“Oh God, I swear — she’s my mother! I didn’t know it was her!” Abed Bardini sobbed as he leaned over his mother, Samira, cradling her head in his arms. Fellow Red Crescent medics tried to console him.

Bardini had unknowingly sat in the ambulance beside her body, wrapped in a white sheet stained dark with blood, as the vehicle bounced across broken roads for about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) toward Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Three people were killed and at least 10 wounded by the Israeli strike on a car in Maghazi refugee camp, according to Palestinian health officials and Associated Press journalists.

Health officials at the hospital said two of the dead were men sitting in the vehicle, and the blast had fatally injured 61-year-old Samira Bardini as she stood nearby. Abed Bardini was in one of two ambulances dispatched to the scene.

Back at the hospital, he unloaded the stretcher with practised professionalism, squinting into the late afternoon sun as he wheeled the body across the hospital courtyard.

Inside, medical staff pulled back the blanket to check for signs of life, and Bardini's strength collapsed.

Later, his tears exhausted, he sat in the morgue beside Samira’s body with his head in his hands, comforted by his Red Crescent colleagues.

They held a funeral prayer over her body in the parking lot, then Bardini personally helped carry the body into an ambulance for burial.

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza says Israel’s war has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. It reported on Wednesday that 102 had been killed over the past 24 hours.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.