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Editor’s note: Warning: This story contains explicit content.
(CNN) – At least 22 people, including at least one baby and one child, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Rafah, Gaza, early Monday, according to hospital sources.
After the attack, the deceased were taken to the Abu Youssef Al Najjar hospital in Rafah, where their loved ones gathered to say goodbye to them.
Video recorded for CNN in the hospital courtyard shows several body bags lying on the ground with dozens of distraught people, including men, women and children, gathered around their deceased loved ones.
People are seen crouching over the body bags, and some caressing the lifeless bodies of their loved ones. You can also see at least the head of a baby peeking out of a bag, while the woman next to her screams: “My whole family died.”
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The baby’s uncle, Mahmoud Abu Taha, held the one-year-old’s lifeless body as he spoke to the camera, saying his parents tried to have children for 10 years before he was born.
“We were sitting in our houses, doing nothing. He was unexpected when they hit the house. “Everyone was sleeping in their beds… most of the people who died were displaced… they were women and children,” he said.
Raising the baby’s body toward the camera, Mahmoud Abu Taha shouted: “This is your goal. This is his goal. This is the generation they are looking for. This is the safe Rafah they talk about.”
In response to a CNN request for comment on Monday’s Rafah attack, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that its fighter jets “striked targets where terrorists were operating within a civilian area in southern Gaza.”
“The IDF will continue to thwart terrorist activity and protect Israeli civilians, in accordance with international law,” he added.
CNN cannot independently verify these claims.
A scene from Al-Najar Hospital in Rafah this Monday. (Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu/Getty Images)
Another member of the Abu Taha family claims in the video that 10 of his relatives were killed in the airstrike. Some of his relatives were displaced from Khan Younis, where several of them were killed in a previous Israeli airstrike. The few who fled Khan Younis to take refuge in Rafah died during the night in Rafah.
“They were sleeping in their homes when the air attack occurred around 12:20 in the morning… there is no safe place. All of Gaza is a target,” he told CNN.
He called on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war: “We want to live. We want peace. Enough of Arab bloodshed.”
See the messages of gratitude from children in Gaza 0:22
Another witness claims that a five-day-old boy named Ghaith Abu Rayya was killed in the airstrike. In the images he is seen opening a small body bag in which the baby’s head is visible, and he says that his body was dismembered.
“We’re alone. Nobody cares about us,” she shouts.
He is seen opening another body bag next to Ghaith’s, sobbing and saying “my dear Ramy,” who says he is Ghaith’s father, 33.
Several men are seen carrying another body bag with the name “Ahmad Saleem Abu Taha” written on it, and the crowd begins to cry inconsolably.
A woman caresses the lifeless face, which has been exposed, and says: “Oh, the smell of it. Oh God. Goodbye, my beloved.”
The death toll in Gaza rose to at least 34,454 after 205 days of war between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry reported Sunday. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian victims and Hamas fighters.
CNN cannot independently verify the ministry’s casualty figures due to a lack of international media access to Gaza.
Tareq Elhelou reported for CNN from Rafah, CNN’s Kareem Khadder, Zeena Saifi and Abeer Salman reported from Jerusalem.
The-CNN-Wire
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