“Death is Better Than This Life”: Displaced Palestinians in Gaza Are Being Bombed in Their Tents

Israel attacked tent encampments and Al-Aqsa hospital as Palestinians fled Israel’s intensifying ethnic cleansing campaign in the north.

Ismail Abu Sharakh sits next to his tent that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike that killed four Palestinians. October 1, 2025. (Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

DEIR AL-BALAH—Displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Wednesday were trying to set up the most basic of amenities in their tent encampment—a makeshift water line—when an Israeli drone strike smashed into them. Shrapnel tore through flesh and bone, killing four, wounding nine, and destroying several tents.

“Ali Hassan al-Masri, a nurse, is now a martyr. There are no more words,” the brother of one of those killed told people crowded at the entrance of Al-Aqsa hospital as the bodies arrived in the back of a small pickup truck wrapped in blankets. Al-Masri’s mother rode in the back with them, raising her bloodied hands in the air and wailing in grief. They were among 77 bodies and 222 injured that arrived at hospitals across Gaza over 24 hours, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Thursday morning.

Scenes outside Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah on October 1, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

“We are displaced. We were in the north and they told us to get out and go to the humanitarian zone. They said go south of Wadi Gaza. We went south of the Wadi. We didn’t leave in the first displacement. This time we couldn’t stay so we came here,” Ismail Abu Sharakh, an eyewitness to the Wednesday strike, told Drop Site as he pointed to destroyed tents at the site of the attack.

He held up a wad of shredded banknotes residents had pooled together to buy a makeshift water line, nothing more than a thin pipe with protruding hoses leading to various tents. Remnants of the Israeli munition lay next to a small crater where it made impact. The surrounding tents were ripped and torn through with shrapnel. Bloodstained mattresses and bits of flesh lay on the ground.

“Everyone here is displaced, no one is involved in anything, not in the resistance or anything. They crushed us with a drone strike. They are turning us into sliced meat,” Abu Sharakh said. “No where is safe, it’s all lies. All of Gaza is not safe. No Arab country is safe. Either they kill us all or they force us all out. We don’t have any energy left. My tent is gone now. What am I supposed to without a tent? My things are gone. I can’t take it anymore. Day after day. We are exhausted.”

A tent encampment in Deir al-Balah targeted by an Israeli airstrike on October 1, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

As President Donald Trump touts his 20-point plan to end the war, Israel has continued to ramp up its genocidal assault across the entire Gaza Strip. An ethnic cleansing campaign focused on Gaza City that began in August and has displaced hundreds of thousands to the south took another turn on Wednesday when Israel’s defense minister issued a final warning for Palestinians in the city, saying it was “the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south,” and that anyone who remained would be considered “terrorists and terror supporters.”

The governorate of Gaza, where famine was officially declared in August, has effectively been cut off from humanitarian aid. The Israeli military closed the main coastal road, Al-Rashid, on Wednesday, no longer allowing Palestinians to travel northward on it. After the decree, Israel targeted a car traveling from the south to the north, killing four Palestinians. On Thursday, another three Palestinians were killed as they tried to go north on foot, according to eyewitnesses. The decision removes one of the last lifelines to Palestinians in some Gaza City neighborhoods who relied on merchants transporting goods from central and southern Gaza to Gaza City using Al-Rashid.

Israel’s all-out offensive on Gaza City has also forced a number of hospitals to shut down completely and international aid groups, including Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to suspend their operations and leave the city.

Meanwhile, at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah on Wednesday, bloodied casualties were being brought in on stretchers, carried on blankets, or stumbling in alone in a steady stream. Half a dozen corpses in white body bags were piled up outside the wall of the hospital. Inside the dilapidated morgue four more dead lay on the red-stained floor, one of them, the size of a young child, was wrapped in a bedsheet. In the morning, dozens of people attended a funeral service at the hospital for Palestinian journalist Yahya Barzaq, who was killed Tuesday along with five other people in an airstrike.

Later on Wednesday, an airstrike hit a tent inside the courtyard of Al-Aqsa hospital, seriously wounding two people. The Gaza Government Media Office said it marked the fifteenth attack on Al-Aqsa hospital over the past two years.

“Death is better than this life,” Abu Sharakh said. “Why injure us? Just kill us and get it over with. This is not a life we are living.”

Sharif Abdel Kouddous contributed to this report.