DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — A Palestinian ambulance worker made a grim discovery when the bloody sheet was removed: The body on the stretcher was his own mother, killed in an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza on Wednesday.

“Oh my God, I swear that’s my mother! I didn’t know it was him!” Abed Bardini cried as his mother leaned over Samira and buried her head in her arms. Other Red Crescent medics tried to console him but were unsuccessful.

Bardini was unknowingly sitting in the ambulance, wrapped in a white sheet stained with blood, as the vehicle bounced along rough roads for nearly 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) towards the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Three people were killed and 10 others were injured in an Israeli attack on a vehicle in the Maghazi refugee camp, according to Palestinian health officials and Associated Press journalists. Health officials at the hospital said that two of the dead were men sitting in the vehicle, while 61-year-old Samira Bardini, who was standing nearby, was fatally injured in the explosion.

Abed Bardini was in one of the two ambulances sent to the scene. Back at the hospital, he unloaded the stretcher with professional professionalism and squinted into the afternoon sun as he carried the body around the hospital courtyard.

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

Then, his tears exhausted, he sat in the morgue, his head in his hands, next to Samira, who was being consoled by her colleagues at the Red Crescent. Funeral prayers were performed over his body in the parking lot, then Bardini personally helped carry the body to the ambulance for burial.

A spokesman for the Israeli army did not immediately comment on the attack. Israel says it is carrying out precision strikes targeting Palestinian militants in Gaza and trying to avoid harming civilians. But strikes often kill women and children.

In the October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war, Hamas-led militants killed approximately 1,200 people and kidnapped nearly 250 people. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has led to the deaths of more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. Authorities do not say how many of them are combatants, but say more than half are women and children. Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Wednesday that 102 deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours.

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Associated Press writer Jack Jeffery in the West Bank city of Ramallah contributed.