At least 15 people, including 10 children and two women, were killed and dozens injured by an Israeli strike while lined up outside a health clinic Thursday morning, according to Project HOPE, the organization that runs the clinic.
Among those killed were children as young as 1 and 4. Video verified by NBC News of the immediate aftermath of the strike in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, showed children slumped into pools of blood and women cradling limp toddlers. The area was shrouded in smoke and dust. Many people were screaming.
“Project HOPE’s health clinics are a place of refuge in Gaza where people bring their small children, women access pregnancy and postpartum care, people receive treatment for malnutrition, and more,” Rabih Torbay, the organization's president, said in a statement. “Yet, this morning, innocent families were mercilessly attacked as they stood in line waiting for the doors to open.”
Asked for comment by NBC News, the Israel Defense Forces said that the strike targeted a member of Hamas, and that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals.”
In one scene captured on video, several bloodied children, including a girl in a pale pink princess dress, along with her twin brother, were piled onto a donkey cart to be taken to Al-Aqsa Hospital.
At the hospital, NBC News' team on the ground witnessed rituals of grief. A man kissed his small, dead nephew on the head. “I love you so much, my love,” he said, sobbing. A woman placed a glitter tulle clip into the wispy hair of the girl in the princess dress, her chubby face still smeared with blood. A mortuary technician tidied another girl's curls that were clumped by blood, the child still in her green T-shirt printed with a cartoon panda.
Several people tended to an inconsolable woman and a man doubled over as he wept into the pavement. Another woman cried about the senselessness of the killings, “What have those children done? What is the guilt of this child to die?” They were starving and just trying to get formula at the clinic, she said.
According to UNICEF, which issued a statement on the strike Thursday, the 1-year-old who was killed had just spoken his first word hours earlier. His mother was injured in the blast and now lies in a hospital bed, clutching her dead baby's shoe.
“No parent should have to face such tragedy,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in the statement. “This is the cruel reality confronting many in Gaza today after months of insufficient aid being allowed into the territory, and parties to the conflict failing to uphold basic responsibilities to protect civilians.”
She called on Israel to “urgently review its rules of engagement to ensure full compliance with international humanitarian law, notably the protection of civilians, including children.”
According to the local Health Ministry, 82 people were confirmed to have been killed in the last 24 hours, bringing the death toll to over 57,700 since October 2023, with more than 130,000 injured. More than 50,000 of those killed and injured have been children, Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and Africa, said in May.
Dua al-Hazarin, a local journalist who captured the immediate aftermath of Thursday's strike on video, told NBC News that she had been on her way to an assignment when the attack "happened right in front of me."
"Shrapnel was flying. People were torn apart and the dust from the missile filled the entire area," she said.
Later outside Al-Aqsa Hospital, men prayed over shrouded bodies and, in a scene now familiar, if no less heartbreaking after 20 months of war, one of them picked up a tiny white bundle to carry the child to the cemetery.
