For the second consecutive year, traditional Eid al-Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan were absent in Gaza on Sunday, as residents of the Palestinian territory awoke to the roar of Israeli bombardment.
“Eid, which was once a day of family reunions and visits, has now become a day of farewells and funerals,” said Nahla Abu Matar, a 28-year-old mother, speaking to AFP.
Like hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents, she has been displaced from her home in northern Gaza and is now living in the southern area of Khan Yunis.
“The mosques where we once prayed have been reduced to heaps of rubble, and the places where we used to gather are now strewn with ruins and bodies,” she said.
Gaza’s rescue teams told AFP that eight people, including five children, were killed in a pre-dawn Israeli air strike in Khan Yunis on Sunday.
“Instead of waking up to the sound of takbirs (Eid prayers), we woke up to the roar of air strikes and explosions,” Abu Matar said.
At dawn, many Gazans gathered across different parts of the territory to offer traditional morning Eid prayers, an AFP correspondent reported.
Some unrolled their prayer mats in the streets amid the rubble, while others prayed inside mosques — including the once-majestic Omari Mosque, whose walls have now collapsed under the bombardments.
Many prayed beside makeshift tents sheltering tens of thousands of displaced Gazans, living in dire humanitarian conditions.
At the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, several residents visited the graves of loved ones killed in the war.
As they prayed, the sounds of artillery fire and the buzz of military drones filled the air.
– ‘How much longer’? –
Ezzedine Mousa, a resident of Gaza City, described an overwhelming sense of fear gripping the region.
“People are afraid to visit one another because a rocket could strike at any moment, claiming their lives,” he said.
“Our children’s eyes reflect their fear, but we do our best to keep them happy with whatever little we have.”
Israel resumed its military campaign across Gaza on March 18 after a fragile weeks-long truce with Hamas collapsed.
Since then, more than 900 people have been killed across Gaza, according to the health ministry of the Hamas-run territory.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
During the attack, Palestinian militants also took 251 hostages, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel launched a blistering military campaign in response to Hamas’s attack, which has so far killed at least 50,277 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
“The world rejoices in Eid while our sons and daughters lie in morgues. How much longer will this tragedy continue?” said Mohamed al-Qadi, who lost his sister and nephew in Sunday’s pre-dawn Israeli strike on Khan Yunis.
Medics and witnesses reported that Israeli air strikes continued in Khan Yunis and some other parts of Gaza throughout the day.
An air strike in the southern city of Rafah wounded two children, according to medics.
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