Night of strikes brings grief to Gazans trying to rebuild

Their faces contorted with pain, relatives mourned two children killed in overnight Israeli strikes on Gaza, leaning over small bodies on the pavement wrapped in sheets, one stained blood red.

- 

In the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza on Wednesday, Palestinians combed through piles of broken cement in a house flattened by an air strike, trying to salvage what they could.

“We had dinner and sat down, and then it was as if Judgment Day had come. All these stones were on top of us,” Muneer Mayman told AFP in the morning, pointing to a pile of cinder blocks and concrete under which he had been found. “We lay there for more than two hours while they were removing the rubble from over us.”

Behind him, men and children were at work sifting through debris, hauling off belongings wrapped in blankets for lack of bags or wheelbarrows.

In south Gaza’s Khan Younis, an elderly woman held her face between her hands as she sat by a few utensils relatives had salvaged from rubble, an AFP journalist saw.

Nuseirat's Al Awda Hospital reported at least 31 people killed in the strikes that broke the relative peace brought by a ceasefire that began on October 10.