A Palestinian ambulance worker made a horrific discovery when the bloody sheet was lifted: The corpse on the stretcher was his own mother, killed by an Israeli airstrike Wednesday in central Gaza. "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 arms, per the AP. Fellow Red Crescent medics tried to console him. Bardini had unknowingly sat in the ambulance beside her body, wrapped in a white sheet stained dark with blood, as the vehicle bounced across broken roads for more than a mile toward Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Three people were killed and at least 10 wounded by the Israeli strike on a car in Maghazi refugee camp, according to Palestinian health officials and AP journalists. Health officials at the hospital said two of the dead were men sitting in the vehicle, and the blast had fatally injured 61-year-old Samira Bardini as she stood nearby. Abed Bardini was in one of two ambulances dispatched to the scene. Back at the hospital, he unloaded the stretcher with practiced professionalism, squinting into the late afternoon sun as he wheeled the body across the hospital courtyard. 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 beside Samira's body with 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 an ambulance for burial. Israel says it carries out precise strikes in Gaza targeting Palestinian militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. But Israel's retaliatory war in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom were women and children, according to local health authorities. Gaza's Health Ministry said Wednesday that 102 deaths were recorded over the past 24 hours. (More Israel-Hamas war stories.)
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