The rescuers started shouting as they reached a little girl of a few months that was alive under the rubble left behind by an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah after another night of shelling in the Palestinian enclave.

Baby’s skinby Maryam Abu Akel, it had turned gray with dust and her he let out little screams, while the rescuers managed to reach her, digging deep into the debris, to free her legs and manage to extricate her.

People had gathered around the ruins of the Abu Edwan family home, where Mariam’s family had taken refuge after fleeing their own home in a more dangerous area near Gaza’s border with Israel.

The aerial bombardment killed 20 people and injured 55 others, according to Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Kindra.

Many displaced persons, such as the Abu Akel family, had found refuge in the Abu Edouane house.

Most of Gaza’s population has been forced to flee their homes in the face of relentless shelling and ground operations that Israel says are aimed at wiping out Hamas, which killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the 7 October.

Israel’s offensive has claimed the lives of more than 21,500 Palestinians, according to enclave authorities, many of them children under the age of 18.

Both Maryam’s mother and sister were killed in the bombing along with members of the Abu Edouane family and other people from other families who were temporarily living with them. Her father and her infant brother Hamed survived the blast.

When the rescuers freed Mariam, one of them ran holding her in his arms to take her to the hospital.

“I was shaking. I was terrified”

The hospitals of Rafah have been faced since the evening with the massive influx of injured people who were rescued from bombed houses.

Nadine Abdulatif, 13, sits next to a pile of debris near the house in Rafah where she and her family took refuge after their own home in Gaza City was destroyed by an airstrike that targeted the building next door them and in which her older brother was killed.

She didn’t stop for a moment to think that she or her other brother could have been killed, he stated. The overnight airstrike shattered windows and shook the building.

“My brother was shaking. I was shaking. I was afraid. I didn’t move from my seat as I was so terrified,” she described.

At the scene of another airstrike, rescuers recovered two infant girls. In an ambulance, medics cleaned a thick layer of dust from their faces as a boy, who was bleeding profusely, sat beside them in a daze.

In the hospital, children are lying on the floor to receive first aid. A boy with bandages around his head and blood covering his face is crying. Next to him lies another boy with a splint around his neck. Two little girls are lying on a stretcher.