Familiar scenes out of Gaza depicted dazed children sorting through blackened detritus and women wailing over white sheets stained deep crimson.

Three-dozen Palestinians were killed late Sunday in an Israeli airstrike on a neighborhood in western Rafah called Tal as Sultan. The IDF said it targeted a pair of Hamas officials in the operation. Video from the scene appeared to show flames engulfing tents following an explosion.

Tal as Sultan’s close to Al-Mawasi, a coastal village that existed previously as a Bedouin borough in one of the Israeli settlements dismantled in 2005. Throughout the war, the IDF advised Gazans to shelter in Al-Mawasi, which is little more than half a mile wide and less than nine miles long.

Earlier this month, the FT described Al-Mawasi as “fetid, thirsty [and] disease-filled.” New arrivals to the “Heathrow airport-sized patch” confront wretched conditions. “Of course there are no toilets,” a five-times displaced father of two told the FT. “We have to shield ourselves with bits of cupboards… when we need to relieve ourselves.” The beach where Gazans build their tents in Al-Mawasi is awash in sewage.

Consider this: Al-Mawasi’s population in 2006 was listed as 1,400. The Israeli military’s “plan” implicitly imagines as many as a million Gazans taking up residence in the town.

Sunday’s deadly strike underscored the peril to those unable to find a spot in Al-Mawasi. Tal as Sultan, the site of the attack, is a mere three miles south.

In its account of the incident, The Wall Street Journal briefly documented the plight of a father who was huddled in Tal as Sultan with his seven children when “the sky [lit] up around 11 PM on Sunday.” Describing the harrowing moment when fire from the blast began to spread through nearby tents, he said, “My kids were crying, all my family was crying. I am also afraid, but what can I do?”

As the Journal explained, the family tried to follow the IDF’s evacuation order this month, but when they arrived in Al-Mawasi, they couldn’t find any room. So, they turned around, trekked the three miles back to Tal as Sultan, and stood up a tent there.

There were conflicting accounts as to whether the area fell within the IDF’s designated safe zone, but it was close enough to spark yet another international outcry. By Monday, the death toll had risen to 45. Makeshift field hospitals were inundated with the injured who numbered in the hundreds.

The incident came just 48 hours (give or take) after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military campaign in and around Rafah. The Israeli government claimed the ICJ order didn’t actually constitute a demand that the military stop all operations, only those which might constitute genocide. Suffice to say the optics around the Tal as Sultan strike are poor indeed.

Additional on-the-ground accounts of the attack were ghastly. A 30-year-old construction worker from Rafah who spoke to The New York Times said flying shrapnel tore through the tent where he was sleeping with his wife and two children. He described “charred bodies” and the screams of burn victims.

A British doctor working in the area called the attack and its aftermath “one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I’ve been working in Gaza.”

The Israeli military said the incident’s under review. “Several civilians in the area” might’ve been “harmed,” an IDF statement read. Later, Benjamin Netanyahu called the disaster “a tragic mistake.”