Israel’s Surprise Bombardment Plunged Palestinians Back into ‘Hell’

 An explosion erupts in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP)
An explosion erupts in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP)
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Israel’s Surprise Bombardment Plunged Palestinians Back into ‘Hell’

 An explosion erupts in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP)
An explosion erupts in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP)

The Israeli bombs began falling before dawn, lighting the sky with orange flares and shattering the stillness.

The surprise wave of airstrikes plunged Palestinians back into a nightmare they had hoped might be behind them.

The bombs crashed across Gaza early Tuesday, setting fire to a sprawling tent camp in the southern city of Khan Younis and flattening a Hamas-run prison. They hit the Al-Tabaeen shelter in Gaza City, where Majid Nasser was sleeping with his family.

"I went out to see where the bombing was. Suddenly the second strike happened in the room next to us," he said. "I heard screaming, my mother and sister screaming, calling for help. I came and entered the room and found the children under the rubble." Everyone was injured, but alive.

Palestinians tried to claw bodies from the wreckage with their bare hands. Parents arrived at hospitals, barefoot, carrying children who were limp and covered in ash. Streets and hospitals filled with bodies.

By midday, over 400 people had been killed. It was one of the deadliest days of the 17-month war, following two months of ceasefire.

During the truce that began on Jan. 19, hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza had returned to their homes, many of them destroyed. A surge of aid brought food and medicines — until Israel cut off aid two weeks ago to pressure the Hamas group into accepting a new proposal instead of continuing with the truce.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan had even provided moments of joy as families held communal sunset meals ending each day’s fast without the fear of bombardment.

Instead, the war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused widespread destruction was back with full force.

"What is happening to us is hell. Hell in every sense of the word," said Zeyad Abed, as he stood among the blackened remains of tents in Khan Younis.

Fedaa Heriz, a displaced woman in Gaza City, said victims were killed in their sleep just before the predawn meal ahead of the daily Ramadan fast.

"They set the alarm to wake up for suhoor, and they wake up to death? They don’t wake up?" she screamed.

Fedaa Hamdan lost her husband and their two children in the strikes in Khan Younis.

"My children died while they were hungry," she said, as funeral prayers were held over their bodies.

Hospitals ‘felt like Armageddon’

Scenes at hospitals recalled the early days of the war, when Israel launched a massive bombardment of Gaza in response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

Survivors on Tuesday held rushed funeral rites over dozens of body bags lining the yard of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Mothers sobbed over the bloodied bodies of children, as warplanes hummed overhead. Doctors struggled to treat the flow of wounded.

"A level of horror and evil that is really hard to articulate. It felt like Armageddon," said Dr. Tanya-Haj Hassan, a volunteer with the Medical Aid for Palestinians aid group.

She described the Nasser Hospital emergency room in Khan Younis as chaos, with patients, including children, spread across the floor. Some were still wrapped in the blankets they had slept in.

Dr. Ismail Awad with the Doctors Without Borders aid group said the clinic received about 26 wounded people, including a woman seven months pregnant with shrapnel in her neck. She later died.

"It was overwhelming, the number of patients," Awad said.

At the Al-Attar clinic in Muwasi in southern Gaza, medical staff said they were forced to operate without light bulbs and emergency ventilation devices.

Israel not only blocked all supplies from entering Gaza two weeks ago, but also cut off electricity to the territory's main desalination plant last week. That has again created scarcities in medicine, food, fuel and fresh water for Gaza's over 2 million people.

Palestinians flee once more

New Israeli evacuation orders covering Gaza’s eastern flank next to Israel and stretching into a key corridor dividing Gaza's north and south sent Palestinians fleeing again.

Israel’s Arabic-language military spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, published a map on X telling Palestinians in those areas, including highly populated neighborhoods, to leave immediately and head for shelters.

"Continuing to remain in the designated areas puts your life and the lives of your family members at risk," he said.

The evacuation zone appeared to include parts of Gaza's main north-south road, raising questions about how people might travel. Palestinians nevertheless gathered their belongings and set out, hardly knowing where to go.

UNICEF spokesperson Rosalia Bollen recalled that the days before the bombardment felt uneasy. She could sense fear. Children would ask if she believed the war would start again.

"This nightmare scenario has been on everyone’s mind," she said. "It’s just heartbreaking that it is materializing right now and that it is shattering the last piece of hope that people had."



Seating Plan for a Pope’s Funeral – It’s Complicated, or Compliqué

Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
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Seating Plan for a Pope’s Funeral – It’s Complicated, or Compliqué

Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)

They may be the most powerful people on earth, but for the seating arrangement at Pope Francis' funeral on Saturday, all foreign leaders will play second fiddle to the Argentines and Italians and surrender to the whims of the French alphabet.

About 130 foreign delegations had so far expressed their desire to attend the funeral, the Vatican said on Friday, and more were expected to do so throughout the day. Those include around 50 heads of state who have been confirmed as attending, among them US President Donald Trump and 10 reigning monarchs.

Apart from the VIPs, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the funeral in St. Peter's Square, which starts at 10 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Saturday. Italian police have laid on one of the most complex security operations in decades.

The official delegations will sit at a section to the right of the altar at the top of the steps leading toward St. Peter's Basilica.

Pride of place goes to Argentina, Francis' native country, whose president, Javier Milei, will sit in the front row. Milei, a maverick right-wing libertarian, had heaped insults on Francis while he was campaigning in 2023, calling him an "imbecile who defends social justice". But the president shifted his tone after he took office that year.

Next comes Italy, the country that surrounds the Vatican and which agreed in 1929 to recognize its sovereignty as the world's smallest state. It gets the second-best seats in the VIP section also because the pope is bishop of Rome and primate of the Catholic bishops of Italy.

That is when the alphabet in French – still considered the language of diplomacy – kicks in for the other delegations. The countries following Italy are ordered according to their names in French and not in their native languages.

So, it is Etats Unis and not United States, Allemagne instead of Deutschland (Germany), and Pays-Bas instead of Nederland (The Netherlands).

Royalty will take precedence. Reigning monarchs -- expected to include royalty such as the kings and queens of Spain and Belgium and Prince Albert of Monaco -- will be seated in front of other heads of state.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said on Friday that no distinction would be made between Catholic and non-Catholic royalty for the seating order. After the royals come the remaining heads of state. Trump, who attracted criticism from Francis because of his immigration policies, will sit ahead of many other leaders because Etats Unis begins with an "E".

That alphabetic logic means that Trump - currently engaged in trying to get a peace deal in the war in Ukraine - will not be sitting near Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Former US President Joe Biden, who has been the target of constant criticism by Trump, is attending the funeral, but will not be part of the official US delegation, a diplomatic source said. This means Biden, a lifelong Catholic, should be sitting further back, with other VIPs.