ICRC hit in Gaza: “heaps of corpses, blood everywhere”

First there were “several large explosions” near the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza. Then a flood of wounded, “heaps of corpses” and “pools of blood,” said an official of the organization on Saturday.

Friday, “large caliber” shots near the ICRC office in Al-Mawasi, near Rafah, caused “a massive influx of victims towards the Red Cross field hospital”, which “received 22 dead and 45 injured”, according to the ICRC, without specifying the origin shootings. It all started around 3:30 p.m. local time (2:30 p.m. in Switzerland) with “three big explosions,” the ICRC head in Rafah, William Schomburg, explained to journalists via video link.

This is not the first time that facilities of the organization, whose headquarters are in Geneva, have been damaged since the start of the war in Gaza. But “the scale of this shock was completely unprecedented, at least for us,” said William Schomburg: “we literally found body parts scattered in different areas, including within the compound (of the ICRC), which we then recovered.

“In a few moments, we saw a stream of wounded people present at the gate of our compound. There were piles of bodies, blood everywhere,” he said. “Frankly, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The extent of the suffering in such a short time was truly shocking to the team. We tried with all our strength to stabilize some of the victims,” he said.

Ambulances transported the injured to the Red Cross field hospital, located “500 meters from our office,” but some of them died there. Around the ICRC, “in the street there were pools of blood, there were bodies scattered on the ground, and an immense feeling of fear among people who were clearly panicked and very desperate, having nowhere to go “, described William Schomburg. It was “a very hard day for the team, for the victims, for the families”.

The ICRC has, next to the building hit by the “projectiles”, a large camp in which many families of ICRC staff members live in tents. For William Schomburg, it is “a miracle” that no member of his team and their families were seriously injured. The coastal area of ​​Al-Mawasi, near Rafah, is home to displaced people chased by the fighting in the rest of the Palestinian territory. It had been declared a “humanitarian zone” by Israel, in theory safe for the displaced.

According to William Schomburg, the ICRC installations are not located in this “humanitarian zone” but just south of this perimeter, in a “block adjacent to it”. However, he said, the locations and coordinates of all the organization’s facilities are known to all parties to the conflict and all premises are marked with the famous Red Cross emblem. “So how do we explain the strikes we experienced yesterday? I think this question should be asked of the parties in conflict and not of us,” he concluded, emphasizing: “I am a humanitarian, I am not a military specialist.”