Burnt by Gaza strike, Palestinian boy suffers agonising pain

Four-year-old Mahmoud Abdel Athim Al-Saafin wakes up screaming from pain caused by burns suffered in an Israeli strike on a school where his family had been sheltering in the Gaza Strip, his father Abdel Athim Al-Saafin said, Reuters reports.

His two-year-old sister, Maysar, was killed in the 14 July strike in Nuseirat Refugee Camp, Saafin said. Her body was so badly burned it resembled “a lump of coal”, he said.

Both sides of Mahmoud’s face were burnt, the skin raw and pink from his scalp down to his neck. Both of his legs and one of his arms were entirely bandaged, as he lay in a bed in a crowded hospital ward, where Reuters saw him fitfully sleeping.

The boy later sat up in bed against a pink pillow, visibly in pain as his father fanned air across his wounds with a piece of a cardboard box.

Saafin said the pain-killers being given to Mahmoud lasted a few hours before wearing off. “Then we beg to get an injection, a sedative or painkiller or sleeping (medication) so the child can sleep,” he said.

READ: Israel attack on aid convoy heading to Gaza City ‘not isolated incident’, UNRWA says

Describing the 14 July attack, Saafin said he had been helping children who had been burnt by a first missile strike when a second strike caused “massive destruction”.

“When we began to pull our children out from under the rubble, we found them all burnt,” he said.

Little Mahmoud saw the body of his sister. “‘My sister is burnt, father’”, Saafin recalled the boy saying.

Gaza health officials say 17 people were killed and 80 wounded in the 14 July Israeli airstrike on the Abu Oreiban School, sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat in central Gaza. The school is run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the father’s remarks. It has said it launched the strike to target fighters who were operating in the area of the school, and took precautions, including using precise munitions to reduce civilian casualties. Israel says Hamas fighters are to blame for harm to civilians for operating among them, which the fighters deny.

UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a 17 July statement on X that at least eight schools had been hit in the Gaza Strip in the preceding 10 days, six of them UNRWA schools.

Schools must never be used for fighting or military purposes by any party to the conflict, he added.

“All rules of war have been broken” in Gaza, he wrote.

Israel has laid to waste much of Gaza since Hamas raided southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking captive 250, according to Israeli tallies. The death toll among Palestinians in Israel’s retaliatory offensive has reached more than 39,000, according to Gaza health authorities.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

READ: UNICEF says 250% increase in Palestinian children killed by Israel in West Bank since 7 October