By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) – Gazan rescuers on Tuesday pulled the body of a four-year-old girl and other dead from the rubble of a municipal building where she and many others were sheltering, and which was damaged during an Israeli air strike.
The girl was named as Shahid Abu Rokbah, and rescuers said her family fled from east of the Khan Younis district to inside the city in search of safety, only to be killed.
“They tried to escape death only to find it… They came to find shelter. They were taking refuge next to the stairs where it could have been a safe place. They targeted them and killed them,” said volunteer Mohammad al Najjar.
He and others dug through the rubble of the building, which housed shops in its ground floor, with hand tools to avoid injuring anyone still alive. A building nearby was also knocked down.
Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Tuesday with the fiercest air strikes in its 75-year conflict with the Palestinians, razing whole districts to dust after Hamas gunmen rampaged through towns in by far the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
Al Najjar said they were retrieving body parts but also hopeful of finding some people alive.
“Some injured people were sleeping here. This is their blood. Here there was a mother and her children. We removed the woman in the evening and the children were martyed and we just took them out from under rubble,” he said.
Ala Abu Tair, 35, who had sought shelter with his family after fleeing Abassan Al-Kabira near the border said, “there is an extraordinary number of martyrs, people are still under the rubble, some friends are either martyrs or wounded,” he said.
“No place is safe in Gaza, as you see they hit everywhere.”
Gaza’s health ministry said Israel’s retaliatory strikes had killed at least 770 people and wounded more than 4,000.