“This is a human liver, a liver,” Akram Bayoumi said as he picked up a limp, charred scrap of flesh from the wreckage of an Israeli airstrike on Nuseirat, in central Gaza.
The overnight strike on a residential block leveled homes, reduced streets to rubble, and killed at least 36 people, tearing some of them apart. “The sunrise came at night,” he said, referring to the flash of Thursday's explosion.
Bayoumi had come to check on his cousin only to find “flesh and body parts,” and his cousin’s family, including his wife and son, buried beneath the rubble.
“I swear, we don’t understand anything.”
Mokhtar Abou Ayaman Elshaar, who lives nearby and rushed to the scene after the strike, said he and other rescuers searched for the wounded and dead using their cellphone flashlights.
They heard the screams and pleas of those buried under the rubble, he said. Without equipment, there was nothing they could do but listen until they went silent.
Elshaar struggled to find words for the compounded losses — families erased, lives lost and a community left to grapple yet another devastating attack, of which there are likely to be more.
"It was an indescribable hard night, like a dream, a fantasy," he said. "What we witnessed last night is beyond any imagination."
The Israeli Defense Forces said the airstrike targeted a “senior terrorist in the Islamic Jihad” responsible for leading attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops, and that it is reviewing reports of civilian casualties.
Outside Al-Awda Hospital, families bid farewell to their loved ones, as body after body were passed through the crowd to be taken for burial.
Almost 45,000 people have died in Gaza due to the conflict, according to local health officials, and the U.N. has estimates nearly 70% of the dead are women and children.
Health officials said Saturday that Israeli airstrikes had killed 18 people, including seven during an attack on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. They said women and children were among the dead, including a baby girl who was only 2 days old.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For the children who do survive, the wounds are far more than just physical.
An assessment published this week by a Gaza-based NGO sponsored by War Child UK found that 96% of children in Gaza feel their death is imminent. Half have said they wanted to die.
A child was tucked under a puffy orange coat, as she lay bloodied and dead, piled on top of other bodies at the morgue. A man stroked the round cheek of another dead child, and two others, tiny enough to be fit into a single stretcher, were carried by the crowd for burial.
Wrapped together in a red blanket that would become their death shroud, Fadi Al-Bayoumi's infant son, Ali, lies on his father's chest, pale and motionless.
The scene, NBC's Gaza crew said, was haunting and almost impossible to process. For the dozens of people weeping and mourning over the dead that day, the grief was no less raw for its regularity.
The sound of fighter jets and quadcopters are always over Nuseirat, Mokthar Elshaar, the neighbor, said.
“It’s not a bloody week, not a bloody year and two months. Nuseirat has been dying every day silently,” he said. “We were not displaced from Nuseirat, but we are being annihilated.”