Small bodies line the floor of a morgue in Khan Younes, all of them belonging to one large family that lost ten members, including eight children, in one of the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, AFP begins its report.

According to rescuers and eyewitnesses, they belonged to the al-Bakri family. At a European hospital, the bodies of seven children were placed in white burial blankets to be covered over their bloodied faces surrounded by their family members, an AFP photographer noted.

People are paying a high price for the war, which began on October 7 when the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip. More than 1,400 people died in Israel, most of them civilians, mowed down by bullets, burned alive or maimed in the first day of the attack.

Israeli retaliatory strikes have killed at least 3,785 Palestinians, most of them civilians, with at least 1,524 children dead, according to Hamas’ Health Ministry figures on Thursday.

On Thursday, the Israeli military said it had carried out hundreds of airstrikes against Hamas infrastructure in 24 hours. Clouds of smoke were visible in various parts of northern Israel. After one such raid, an AFP photographer saw numerous signs of destruction on the streets of Gaza, including debris, broken windows and collapsed buildings.

Further south, Diala (2), Ayman (3), Hamada (5) and Zaher (2) Bakri, as well as Uday and Jamal Abu Al-Naja and Nabil and Asil Omran, aged two to five, ” they were sleeping when they (the Israelis) destroyed the house that fell on their heads,” Bakri family patriarch Abu Mohammad Wafi al-Bakri, 67, told AFP.

According to eyewitnesses, they were on the first floor of a three-story building located between Khan Younes and Rafah, and their bodies were found an hour after the raid. “None of my children have any connection with Palestinian organizations. At the time of the attack, the man was not in the house,” he added.

Running away doesn’t help either

According to Palestinian medical sources, another Israeli raid in Rafah killed Arij’s mother Marwan al-Banna and her two daughters, Sarah and Samia, who were under ten years old.

Arij Marwan al-Banna left her home in Gaza City after the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the estimated 1.1 million residents of the small territory’s north to seek refuge with her parents in Rafah, further south.

She was seven months pregnant. Doctors at a hospital in Rafah delivered a posthumous baby by caesarean section, but he was already dead, doctors said.