Devastation after Israeli strike on Rafah camp

Men cleared away the charred debris of shelters, and children salvaged food in Gaza's southern city of Rafah on Monday after an Israeli strike torched a camp for displaced Palestinians.

"People were not just injured or killed, but charred," 24-year-old Mohammed Hamad told AFP in the aftermath of the strike that killed at least 45 people.

The death toll came from the health ministry in the Gaza Strip, which also said that 249 people were wounded in the strike.

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"My cousin's daughter, a child no more than 13, was among the martyrs. She had no features at all because shrapnel tore off her face," Hamad said.

Israel's military said its aircraft "struck a Hamas compound in Rafah" on Sunday night, killing two senior officials.

The strike caused a fire that blazed through the camp in the Rafah governorate's Tal Al-Sultan area, reducing tents and shelters to ashes.

Footage released by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society showed chaotic night-time scenes of ambulances racing to the attack site and evacuating the wounded, including children.

As Palestinians cleared the site on Monday, only blackened metal sheeting and charred planks remained, the tent shelters having been all but obliterated.

"When these rockets fall on a tower block there are dozens of martyrs, so what about when they are tents?" lamented a man called Hamad.

"When we heard the sound (of the explosion), the sky suddenly lit up," displaced Palestinian Muhannad, an eyewitness, told AFP.

"We saw charred bodies and dismembered limbs as a result of the use of (...) missiles that caused a massive fire," the director of Gaza's civil defence agency, Mohammad al-Mughayyir, said.

Mughayyir, who oversaw the response to the fire, said on Monday "rescue and retrieval operations concluded last night, while efforts to extinguish the fire continued for 45 minutes".

He said battling the inferno was made even more difficult because of fuel and water shortages.

"We also saw cases of amputations, injured children, women, and elderly among the dead," he added.

Displaced Palestinians who had sought shelter in the area after being told by the Israelis to evacuate their homes were shocked when the camp was targeted.

"They dropped leaflets asking us to go to the humanitarian zone in Tal al-Sultan, so we complied and came here," Abu Muhammad, who was displaced from north Gaza five months ago, told AFP.

"But yesterday when I was having dinner at sunset, suddenly it felt like there was an earthquake — the ground shook violently," he said.

Mohammed Abu Qamar, 27, said he was equally baffled by the strikes, after he too moved from north Gaza to the camp that had been labelled a "safe zone" by the Israeli authorities.

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