A medic from Gaza realizes that he is carrying the body of his mother, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike

DEIR EL BALAH – A Palestinian ambulance worker made a gruesome discovery when they lifted a bloodstained sheet: the corpse on a stretcher was his own mother, killed in an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza on Wednesday.

“Oh God, I swear, she’s my mother! I didn’t know it was her!” Abed Bardini sobbed as he leaned over his mother, Samira, cradling her head in his hands. Red Crescent medical colleagues tried to console him.

Bardini sat unconscious in the ambulance next to her body, wrapped in a white sheet stained with blood, as the vehicle bounced along broken roads about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

According to Palestinian health officials and Associated Press journalists, three people were killed and at least 10 were injured as a result of an Israeli attack on a car in the Magazi refugee camp. Health officials at the hospital said the two dead were men sitting in a car, and the explosion fatally wounded 61-year-old Samira Bardini as she stood nearby.

Abed Bardini was in one of the two ambulances that arrived at the scene. Back at the hospital, he unloaded the stretcher with practiced professionalism, squinting in the late afternoon sun as he wheeled the body across the hospital yard.

Inside, medical staff pulled back the blanket to check for signs of life, and Bardini’s strength collapsed.

Later, his tears exhausted, he sat in the morgue next to Samira’s body, his head in his hands, comforted by his Red Crescent colleagues. They held a funeral prayer over her body in the parking lot, then Bardini personally helped carry the body into the ambulance for burial.

A spokesman for the Israeli military did not comment on the strike. Israel says it carries out precision strikes in the Gaza Strip against Palestinian militants and tries not to harm civilians. But women and children often die from blows.

Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 in an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war. More than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, according to local health authorities, who did not specify the number of combatants but said more than half were women and children. Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported on Wednesday that 102 deaths had been reported in the past 24 hours.

___

Associated Press writer Jack Jeffrey in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.