A Gaza doctor realizes he is carrying the body of his own mother, killed by an Israeli airstrike

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — A Palestinian ambulance worker made a gruesome discovery as the bloody sheet was lifted: the corpse on the stretcher was his own mother, killed Wednesday by an Israeli airstrike 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 and cradled her head in his arms. Fellow Red Crescent medics tried to comfort him, without success.

Bardini had sat unknowingly next to her body in the ambulance, wrapped in a white sheet darkly stained with blood, as the vehicle bounced along broken roads for about two kilometers towards the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Three people were killed and 10 injured in the Israeli attack on a car in the Maghazi refugee camp, according to Palestinian health officials and Associated Press journalists. Health officials at the hospital said two of the dead were men who were in the vehicle, while the explosion fatally injured 61-year-old Samira Bardini as she stood nearby.

Abed Bardini was in one of the two ambulances sent to 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 courtyard.

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

Later, exhausted from tears, he sat in the morgue next to 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, after which Bardini personally helped carry the body to an ambulance for burial.

An Israeli army spokesman did not immediately comment on the attack. Israel says it is carrying out precise attacks on Palestinian militants in Gaza and trying to prevent harm to civilians. But the strikes often kill women and children.

Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 in the October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. They do not say how many fighters, but more than half were women and children. Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 102 deaths had been recorded in the past 24 hours.

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Associated Press writer Jack Jeffery in Ramallah, West Bank contributed.