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An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed four children — all members of the same family — and wounded several others on a Gaza beach in front of a hotel packed with foreign journalists. The first shell hit around 4 p.m. local time, while a second strike hit survivors as they ran up the beach toward the safety of the hotel.
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The Guardian's Peter Beaumont, who watched the strikes hit from the hotel terrace, called it a "personal low point" to have administered first aid, along with other journalists, to wounded children. He offered this deeply distressing account of the attack:
Pulling up the T-shirt of the first boy, who looks about eight years old, we find a shrapnel hole, small and round as a pencil head, where he has been hit in the chest over the second rib. Another boy, a brother or cousin, who is uninjured, slumps by the wall of the terrace, weeping by his side.
The boy cries in pain as we clean and dress the wound, wrapping a field dressing around his chest, pressing to staunch the bleeding. He winces in pain, and he is clearly embarrassed too as a colleague checks his shorts to look for unseen femoral bleeding. [The Guardian]
Nearly 200 Palestinians have died in the conflict so far, an estimated 80 percent of whom were civilians, according to the United Nations; Israel has suffered one casualty.
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