The head of orthopedic surgery at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza, Fadel Naim, had just finished a procedure when he heard a huge explosion and his department filled with people screaming for help.
"People came running into the surgery department screaming help us, help us, there are people killed and wounded inside the hospital," he said. He found the hospital full of dismembered bodies and wounded people.
"We tried to save whoever could be saved but the number was too great for the hospital team," he said.
Tuesday's airstrike killed hundreds of Palestinians and wrecked a diplomatic mission by U.S. President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel on Wednesday to calm the region but was snubbed by Arab leaders who called off an emergency summit.
Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli airstrike for the blast. Israel, however, said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad, which denied blame.
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Naqa was proud of the 100-year-old Baptist hospital. In a region of conflict, it welcomed all faiths, offering patients a church and a mosque.
On Tuesday, people seeking shelter from the indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes by Israel, in response to a surprise incursion by Hamas, walked into the hospital to their deaths.
Blood stained the walls and the ground in a normally peaceful place that helped patients recover.
"This place created a safe haven for women and children, those who escaped the Israeli bombing into this hospital, those who saw this place as a safe haven," said Naqa.
"Without warning this hospital was targeted. We don't know what the shell is called but we saw the results of it when it targeted children and ripped their bodies into pieces."
The death toll from the hospital explosion was by far the highest of any single incident in Gaza during the current violence and saw protests erupt in the occupied West Bank and the wider region, including in Jordan and Türkiye.
Before Tuesday's blast, health authorities in Gaza said at least 3,000 people had died in 11 days of Israeli bombardment.
The scenes of destruction from the hospital were horrific even by the standards of the past days, which have confronted the world with relentless images, first of Israeli casualties and then of Palestinian families buried under rubble from indiscriminate Israeli strikes.
The Gaza Health Ministry sources put the death toll at 500. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble Wednesday.
"The massacre carried out by the Israeli occupation at the Baptist Hospital is the massacre of the 21st century and it is a continuation of its crimes since the Nakba of our people in 1948," said Salama Marouf, head of the Hamas media office.
"Nakba," or "catastrophe," refers to when many Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel's creation.
