CNN :
Bullet holes fleck the bloodstained walls of the Miqdad family home, in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza.
CNN footage from the house shows a cream teddy bear perched on a white cupboard, with broken plastic strewn across the shelves. In another room, mother-of-four Rasha Abdel Miqdad shudders with grief, before breaking down in tears.
“This is the blood of my son, Yamen. May God bless his soul,” the 32-year-old Palestinian told CNN on June 12. “My son was innocent.
“We are civilians, and we have no connection to the resistance or anything or any faction. We have no connection to it at all.”
CNN spoke to seven members of the family who described a horror-filled haze of gunfire, tank artillery and aerial bombardment around their home on June 8. Israeli forces stormed through the building searching for militants and indiscriminately spraying bullets, according to the family members. Four people suffered gunshot wounds, leaving one child severely injured and 12-year-old Yamen dead, the family alleged to CNN. Soldiers interrogated and beat male relatives, and forced a child to strip, relatives claimed.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released footage on June 16 showing forces in the Miqdad’s house on the same days. In the heavily edited video, shared on social media and described as forces “securing the area” during the operation, members of the Israeli Paratroopers Reconnaissance Battalion appear to enter the home. The video does not show what happened on the third floor, where the family say they were attacked.
CNN has reached out to the IDF but has not received a response to the specific allegations made.
The allegations provide a window into the scale and force of this free hostages taken during the attack on Israel last October. Eyewitnesses say they are still traumatized, after more than 270 Palestinians were killed and another 698 people injured on June 8, according to authorities in Gaza. Health staff said that hospitals, already stretched beyond their limits, were completely overwhelmed.
These extremely high reported casualty tolls prompted renewed warnings from human rights organizations who say Israel is not doing enough to protect civilians as it prosecutes its war, and that militants are endangering Palestinian lives.
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) , Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups may have committed war crimes through their actions. OHCHR spokesman Jeremy Laurence said the Israeli operation “seriously calls into question whether the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution… were respected” and that, by holding hostages in densely populated areas, Palestinian armed groups are “putting the lives of Palestinian civilians, as well as the hostages themselves, at added risk.”
It was not clear how many of those killed were militants. The Ministry of Health in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. But the ministry said many of those impacted were women and children, as well as people recently displaced by Israel’s offensive in the southern city of Rafah.
The IDF has disputed the ministry’s numbers, claiming that casualties from the operation were “under 100.” CNN cannot independently verify the casualty figures given by either side.