The alley-like streets and closely spaced buildings in the Block 6 neighborhood of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza were full of people on the afternoon of Oct. Some stood in a long queue at the local bakery. Others piled up more than usual in small apartments.
Many ignored or could not listen to repeated calls from the IDF to evacuate further south to avoid the approach of troops and aerial bombardment, believing that they were relatively safe deep inside the sprawling, densely populated Camp.
"We were at home, with many relatives and even people we had never met before, taking refuge together in a safe place," recalls resident year-old Mohammed Tabaq.
At around 3: 30 PM, Israeli warplanes dropped multiple large bombs in a tight pattern on the neighborhood. Satellite images showed that the explosions flattened a whole rectangular block, leaving deep craters where more than a dozen buildings are located.
The strike killed Ibrahim Bayari, the commander of the Hamas battalion in Jabalia, who Israeli intelligence believed was conducting the battle in the camp, and dozens of other militants, according to the IDF. But it also left the bodies of at least 126 people under the rubble, one of the bloodiest attacks of the Gaza war, according to airwiz, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of London that investigates civilian casualties in conflict zones.
The decision to bomb an urban neighborhood full of people in the middle of the afternoon to kill a Hamas leader early in the war indicated that Israel was ready to use overwhelming force against the Hamas leadership, even if it meant risking large numbers of civilian casualties.
In the following days and weeks, Israeli forces pushed into Gaza, seeking to dismantle Hamas in response to the militant group's surprise attack on October 7 that left more than 1,200 dead in Israel. The Israeli offensive caused heavy casualties, with an estimated 21,000 people killed, according to Palestinian health officials, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and other countries. The Biden administration, a staunch Israeli ally, has repeatedly told the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that its military operation inflicts a lot of civilian casualties.
Even against this background, the air strike of Jabalia stands out. The Wall Street Journal investigation, based on more than a dozen interviews with survivors and senior Israeli military officers, suggests that military planners made a series of miscalculations based on incomplete information that led to much greater destruction and loss of life than they expected.
Among the results are:
* Israel decided not to warn civilians in the area of an impending air strike via telephone messages for fear of giving the militants time to evacuate.
* The army appears to have deployed at least two of the largest bombs in its arsenal instead of using smaller target munitions.
* Air Force commanders tried to limit collateral damage by directing guided bombs between buildings and using fuses that delayed the explosions a little until the munitions penetrated below the surface - but by destroying the tunnels they also knocked down the buildings standing above them.
In a written statement, the IDF said that it "abides by international law, directs its strikes at military targets and invests significant resources to minimize harm to civilians". The statement added that the military "launches attacks only when the expected harm to civilians is not excessive in relation to the expected military advantage, based on the information available before the attack".
The IDF said that a team of military investigators "separated from the IDF chain of command" was examining the bombing, referring to the IDF.
Several Israeli officials have argued that Hamas is ultimately responsible for the high death toll because it chooses to operate in civilian population centers.
"There is only so much you can know."It is somehow limited and there is a fog of war,"said a senior Israeli military legal official familiar with the deliberations going into such a strike. "If you try to be effective in defeating your enemy and protecting your civilians, sometimes you can't avoid it."
The officials said that Israeli planners expected some buildings to collapse in the attack, but the damage was much worse than expected, and blamed the extensive tunnel complex underneath.
Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said:"the underground complex, the tunnels built by Hamas, collapsed and this is our assessment of why we see significant structural damage around it.
Adel Haq, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who focuses on the international law of armed conflict, did not say anything the IDF said about the strike that suggested it gained anything more than a moderate military advantage by killing biari.
"The October 31 attack on Jabalia is severe in terms of the expected civilian damage,"Haq said. "To justify such a significant civilian damage, you expect some kind of game changer that would have a decisive impact on the course of the war."
Said Abu Awn, a 30-year-old graduate of the University of Palestine, left his home in the northern Gaza Strip on the first day of the war, with his mother and two brothers, to live with his aunt in Jabalia camp, where they thought it would be safer.
Fearing air strikes, the family barely went out, but Abu Aoun left the house at noon on October 31 to try to buy bread from the neighborhood bakery. He had been waiting in line for more than two hours when the bombs fell in quick succession a hundred yards in front of him.
Survivors said the explosions shook the ground like an earthquake and crushed concrete buildings, engulfed the target area in a pulsating cloud of flying debris, black smoke and dust that left the extent of the damage unclear for more than five minutes.
"I fled immediately because we know that they are shelling the same area more than once,"Abu Aoun said.
He said that when the smoke and dust were cleared, instead of crowded multi-storey buildings and small shops, there was an unrecognizable lunar landscape of deep craters, mountains of concrete and steel debris, downed power lines and burning fires.
"What I saw were bodies, some in pieces, and huge numbers of unimaginable injuries,"said Tabak, another survivor, who lost an eye in the attack. "Dust was filling the air and the smell of blood was everywhere ."
Mohammed Yassin, 25, who rushed to the site and began shooting a video about the aftermath with his phone, said that the bodies were scattered in the debris, some were torn to pieces, and their clothes evaporated in the explosion. The severed parts of the still upright buildings circled the blast zone, some with the victims visible in the bedrooms on the second floor.
"The buildings are so close to each other that the whole Square was flattened to the ground,"Yassin said.
The video showed black bodies lying next to the twisted wreckage of cars as stunned survivors screamed in anguish. Some rushed to the pits, digging with their hands to pull the victims to the background sound of sirens from oncoming ambulances.
The Israeli attack killed between 126 and 136 civilians, including 69 children, according to Airwars.
Yassin said many of the dead and wounded were displaced from Beit Hanoun, an area near Gaza's border with Israel. Yassin added that all the families who had lived in the neighborhood since fleeing to Jabalia when Israel was founded in 1948 had also been wiped out.
Thaer Hussein, 20, a recent graduate of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, fled to the neighborhood from the Beit Lahiya area, where heavy fighting was also underway, and was living in a relative's one-story house, along with 30 other relatives. He was standing in line for water with three cousins when the bomb hit, according to his aunt.
"The explosion destroyed the entire residential block and turned the Earth upside down,"she said.
She said that the four young people disappeared after the explosion. After three days of searching, family members found them in an Indonesian hospital. Hussein died and his three cousins were severely injured.
There were so many wounded that most of them were loaded into civilian vehicles and piled into carts pulled by donkeys for transportation to the nearby Indonesian hospital, according to Yasin.
"Young children arrived at the hospital with deep wounds and severe burns."They came without their families,"Mohamed hawajra, a nurse at the MSF medical charity, said in a statement issued by the organization about the attack. "Many were screaming and asking for their parents."I stayed with them until we managed to find a place, as the hospital was full of patients."
Experts who examined the attack say it appears that Israeli warplanes dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs, the second largest type in its conventional arsenal.
The two impact craters visible in satellite images of the site after the attack were about 40 feet wide. A crater just under 40 feet wide is a feature of the 2,000-pound bomb set to explode after the initial point of impact, according to a 2016 advisory study for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
One of the consultants on the ICRC study was Mark Garlasco, a former UN military analyst and war crimes investigator who served as the head of high-value targeting at the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of staff in 2003. He said that the size of the crater was consistent with the use of the GBU-31, a 2,000-pound bomb provided by the United States to Israel, although he added that it is possible that Israel used a different type of bomb, with a hidden warhead, designed to penetrate reinforced concrete structures.
Lt. Col. Paul lushchenko, an instructor at the U.S. Army War College who has studied efforts to reduce civilian casualties in airstrikes, said that the use of such heavy bombs in a crowded area against the Hamas leader reflects Israel's willingness, especially in the first weeks of the ground war in Gaza, to use heavy bombing, rather than smaller and more accurate munitions, even if it means risking civilian casualties.
"This was a high-value target but also a high-return target, anyone that Israel thought it needed to take out,"he said. "They were willing to accept a much higher responsibility for harming civilians than we would have otherwise wanted in the age of precision munitions."
He said that Israel could have used" small-diameter bombs " supplied by the United States, which it has and are designed to reduce civilian casualties, have a much smaller blast radius and delayed fuses.
Officials said that in the Israeli Air Force, teams of personnel are evaluating the strike before it happens. Engineers are supposed to assess structural damage that can lead to civilian casualties, along with military lawyers trained in the laws of war. But the ultimate responsibility for approving the strike is a commander in uniform.
The officials said that the October 31 attack was planned and carried out quickly after the Shin Bet, Israel's Internal Security Agency, provided real-time intelligence about the biari site. The fleeting nature of the information pressed the time when the commanders thought they had to carry out the bombing before they lost the opportunity to eliminate it, the officials said.
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