On Monday, Israel struck the southern and central Gaza Strip, shortly after a weekend strike from their military killed at least 90 Palestinians in an airstrike and hundreds of others were wounded in what was supposed to be a designated humanitarian zone.
The weekend strike turned the al-Mawasi area, which is located near the Mediterranean coast, into a charred wasteland “littered with burning cars and mangled bodies”, Reuters reported. Those who survived a weekend of violence were displaced soon after.
"Those moments as the ground shook underneath my feet and the dust and sand rose to the sky and I saw dismembered bodies - was like nothing I have seen in my life," said Aya Mohammad, 30, a market seller in Mawasi, who spoke to Reuters.
"Where to go is what everybody asks, and no one has the answer."
Further fighting took place on Monday in Rafah, residents reportedly said. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) blew up several homes in the western and central parts of the city. Medical officials also said they recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians in the eastern areas of the city killed by the IDF whose bodies had already begun to decompose.
The IDF has also begun increasing their aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi refugee camps, said Reuters. And at least five Palestinians were killed in an IDF airstrike on a house in the Maghazi camps, said health officials.
Also on Sunday, at least 22 Palestinians were killed and 100 were wounded in a separate strike on a UN-run school in central Gaza that was being used as a shelter, said the Palestinian health ministry. The IDF excused the attack saying that they had targeted a number of Hamas militants, however witnesses told BBC Arabic that there were no armed fighters there and that children were among the casualties. It was the fifth attack on or near a school in just eight days.
One woman who experienced the strike on Abu Oraiban School in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp described the horror she had seen.
“As soon as the explosion occurred the walls of the room collapsed on us,” she said. “I saw a little boy whose leg was bleeding and a dismembered corpse which people covered with blankets. I also saw a little boy lying in a pool of blood, with his whole face bleeding.”
“I quickly ran out of the school. I found my aunt at the school gate, hugging her burnt young son. When I left the school, I saw many injured people lying on the ground and bodies torn to pieces.”
The IDF said they had been targeting a Hamas leader during their strikes over the weekend, but they have not been able to prove that Mohammed Deif was killed.
On Saturday, two Egyptian security sources said that ceasefire talks, which seemed possible in recent weeks, have come to a halt after three days of intense negotiations failed to produce a viable outcome. The sources also accused Israeli mediators of behavior that revealed “internal discord”.
The death toll in the Gaza Strip has reached over 38,000 since last October, while over 88,800 have been injured, according to the Palestinian enclave's health ministry's estimates. According to the UN, an estimated 1.9 million people - 90% of Gaza’s population - have been forced to leave their homes including some of those who have been displaced up to 10 times.