They Were Told They Were in a Safe Area. Then Came the Missiles.

When the explosions began on Saturday, many Gazans were sitting down to meager breakfasts, or drinking tea. They were waking up their children, or walking down the road.

Suddenly, the sound of destruction was booming through Al-Mawasi, the once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza where tens of thousands of Palestinians had fled to after the Israeli military declared it safe for civilians.

Despite that designation, Israel struck the area with a barrage of airstrikes on Saturday morning, saying that it had targeted Hamas’s top military commander and another military leader. While it remained unclear on Sunday whether the main target had been killed, Gaza health officials said more than 90 people were killed in the attack, about half of them women and children, and more than 300 wounded.

During the attack, sand flew high up in the air and came down “like winter rain,” said Ahmed Youssef Khadra, 38, who was having breakfast with his family in their shared tent.

Their tent collapsed on them. Mr. Khadra could see bodies hurled this way and that, landing only to be buried in sand, he said. Smothered in sand himself, he said he could barely process what was happening.

“What was that? What happened? What will happen? We didn’t understand,” he said, describing his panic over his four children, who had been in the tent with him. “At a moment like this, you think of one thing — what happened to you, and what might have happened to the people you were with? Have they died?”