The Israeli army razed an entire housing block to eliminate one Hamas commander on Saturday, December 2, in Shujaiya, a district of Gaza City, causing carnage among the population. According to the Palestinian enclave's Civil Defense, the death toll from this operation is in the hundreds, making it possibly the deadliest bombardment in almost two months of war.

Abou Nafez, a former Palestinian Authority police officer, was at his home in Shujaiya early Saturday afternoon, with his wife and their children, when a section of the house "fell on him," in his words. In the space of a few moments, the Israeli army dropped several bombs on a block of around 50 homes. In the footage recorded by a journalist from the Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera, the entire street disappears, giving way to an apocalyptic landscape, from which no sign of life emerges. The grey concrete swallows up furniture, clothes, toys, kitchens, and bathrooms as it collapses under the power of the explosions.

"For an hour, you couldn't see anything, everything was shrouded in dust and smoke was billowing from the ruins," said Nafez. Neighbors estimate that a thousand people were present at the time of the attack, between those who lived there and those who had come to take refuge in the neighborhood after fleeing the bombs elsewhere. As elsewhere in Gaza, each family shares a small building of "four to five stories," said Nafez.

Gaza's Civil Defense, which was dispatched to the scene, initially cleared "around 60" bodies, according to spokesman Mahmoud Basel, before having to withdraw to protect themselves from further gunfire. The teams had great difficulty in navigating the "10 craters, each around 25 meters long and 15 meters deep" left behind by the explosions, he said. Based on the number of missing residents, Basel estimated that over 300 people were dead, most of them still trapped in the rubble. Shortly before dusk, his men heard voices. "We pulled out a woman who was nine months pregnant. The teams were still searching for survivors when they themselves were targeted by a strike. Four of us were injured and taken to hospital," said Basel.

Nafez escaped with only minor injuries. "I haven't seen anything like this since the war started," said the 45-year-old father. "We don't know whose bodies we're finding, they're all mixed up, the houses have collapsed one on top of the other." On Sunday, he moved his family to a neighboring district in Gaza City. He had returned to Shujaiya during the truce, having fleed the neighborhood with his family of 10 just after October 7 and the start of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, in retaliation for Hamas's attack. Residents suspected that Shujaiya, located close to Israeli territory, would be one of the entry points for Israeli tanks. The densely populated neighborhood was the scene of furious fighting during the 2014 war, in which it paid a very heavy price.

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