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Scenes from a Ramadan massacre

Palestinians in Gaza City describe collecting body parts from the street and fending off stray dogs as they awaited ambulances amid Israel's attacks.

By  Ahmed Ahmed  March 20, 2025

Bodies of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli airstrikes overnight during Israel’s renewed bombing of Gaza, European Hospital, Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, March 18, 2025. (Doaa Albaz/Activestills)

On Monday evening, Oday Al-Zaigh was catching up with his friend and neighbor, Motasim Zain Eldeen, in central Gaza City. They spoke with pride about how the residents of their neighborhood, Al-Moghrabi, had cleaned the streets and rebuilt what they could in recent weeks, trying their best to make it beautiful again after it had been severely damaged by Israeli attacks during 15 months of genocide. After parting ways, Al-Zaigh went to sleep — until he was abruptly awoken at around 2 a.m by the sudden resumption of Israel’s onslaught.

“I opened my eyes as I fell to the floor, and parts of the ceiling and shattered glass from the windows came crashing down on my body,” he told +972. “The flames from the explosion lit up the apartment. I thought I was dead.”

Realizing he was still breathing, and thinking his house was the target of the bombing, Al-Zaigh feared that a second airstrike could be imminent. He turned on his phone’s flashlight, pulled himself up, and rushed to help lift the rubble off his nine siblings and his parents so he could get them all out onto the street.

“I removed a large stone that had fallen on my mother’s chest, grabbed her hand, and pulled her downstairs,” Al-Zaigh recounted. “Right outside our front door, there was half of a woman’s body. My mother fainted.”

As Al-Zaigh took in the scale of the destruction around him, he saw more dismembered bodies scattered on the street. Together with his neighbors, he gathered up the various body parts and put them in plastic bags on the sidewalk.

“The smell of blood and decaying flesh attracted stray dogs to the area,” he explained, in tears. “For two hours, we threw stones at them and guarded the bodies until a single ambulance arrived. But they only had space to take the wounded; they refused to take the dead bodies.”

Oday Al-Zaigh looks out of his front door at the damage caused by Israeli airstrikes, Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, March 18, 2025. (Ahmed Ahmed)

When the light of morning arrived, Al-Zaigh and his neighbors realized that there were still more bodies strewn across the street — and he was shocked to discover that he recognized one of them. “We found the upper half of a disfigured body lying 100 meters away from the house that was targeted,” he explained. “It was the body of my friend, Motasim.”

Israel later announced that the target of the strike was Abu Obeida Al-Jamasi, a senior political figure in Hamas. “Even if they want to kill a specific person, they aim to destroy as much as possible and kill more, forcing us to leave our land,” Al-Zaigh said. “I evacuated [during the last year and a half] to southern Gaza, but I will never leave my house again.”

‘There were dead bodies scattered all over the ground’

At 1:40 a.m. that same morning, 46-year-old Fouad Saqalla woke up in his home in Gaza City’s Old City to prepare for suhoor, the pre-dawn meal ahead of the daily Ramadan fast. He was about to wake up the rest of his family when a deafening series of airstrikes hit a nearby building.

“There was rubble falling everywhere; some fell on the mattress where I had been sleeping,” he told +972. “I thought I was having a nightmare until my 7-year-old daughter, Hala, clung to my leg and began to loudly cry.”

Saqalla, too, stepped outside to a scene of carnage. “There were dead bodies scattered all over the ground,” he said. “The painful scenes reminded me of the first days of the war in 2023, from which I am still trying to recover.”

Azza Al-Nashar, 19, lives in a house close to Saqalla’s. She was reciting the Quran when the bombing started. “The land shook, and the sounds of the explosions were terrifying,” she recounted. “For several minutes, I couldn’t move my body out of fear.”

Palestinians inspect the damage caused by an Israeli airstrike on a tent in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, March 18, 2025. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

The first concern for Al-Nashar and her family was the safety of her uncle, Mohammed. He had set up a tent on the roof of their building to live with his wife, Sabreen, and their four children after his own home in the same neighborhood was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes last year.

“My other uncles and neighbors rushed to the roof to check on him,” she told +972. “When they found him, he had fainted, and was covered with pieces of a destroyed wall. Thank God, he survived with minor injuries.”

By chance, Sabreen and the children had been staying at her family house elsewhere in Gaza City, and they survived the night. “We are all terrified, and don’t want to lose more people again,” Al-Nashar said.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence, told +972 that Israeli forces launched over 100 simultaneous strikes on residential homes, shelters, and tents housing displaced people across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning, killing at least 400 people and wounding 600 — most of them women and children. 

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“This is one of the most horrific massacres [of the war],” he said. “Civil Defense teams and medical crews worked to their fullest capacity but faced serious difficulties because of a lack of heavy machinery and vehicles and because of repeated bombing in the areas where they were working.”

Israel’s attacks on Gaza have continued throughout the week, with the total death toll since Tuesday morning rising to around 600 by the time of writing. “The medical system is struggling due to a severe lack of resources,” Basal said. “This situation demands immediate global action to protect innocent civilians from further massacres.”