JERUSALEM AND GAZA CITY — As Israeli forces closed in on Gaza City, Mohammed Barbari joined the scramble by its most intrepid residents Sunday for dwindling supplies of food they would need while hunkering down at home.
The first explosion tore through the central Firas Market at 11:30 a.m. as he approached from adjacent Palestine Square. Unable to turn his yellow Volkswagen Golf around in traffic, he kept driving toward the hail of shrapnel and the screams of scattering shoppers.
Trapped on Omar Mokhtar Street, which bisects the sprawling complex, Barbari felt a second blast shake his car and shatter its back right window.
He saw a man lying in the street with both legs severed.
"God protect us!" the 31-year-old father of five recalled thinking.
Medical workers said two Israeli tank shells struck the market a minute apart, killing five Palestinian civilians.
An additional 40 wounded people were bundled into private cars for a harrowing drive to the city's Shifa Hospital, which has been overwhelmed by victims of Israel's offensive on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israeli leaders say the ground assault they began late Saturday, after eight days of airstrikes, is meant as a lesson to Hamas: The Jewish state does not shrink from confronting its enemies; it fully intends to halt the militant group's near-daily rocket fire at southern Israeli communities.
But to Gaza's 1.5 million residents, the advance of thousands of troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships carries a different message: No place in the densely populated 140-square-mile enclave, about one-third the size of Los Angeles city, is safe.
The ground fighting has imposed not only mortal danger, but also a new level of hardship on a people who already were suffering from shortages of electricity, water, cooking gas and other basic supplies amid an Israeli blockade.
"Anyone who survives this wave, it will be like they were born again," said Mahmoud Musa, 55, a first-grade teacher in Deir al Balah.
As the front line moved ever closer, ambulance sirens wailed and the sky filled with smoke. With nowhere to flee, most of the city's 400,000 residents huddled indoors.
Firas Market, normally jammed at midday, held only about 100 shoppers at the time of the shelling, a factor in the relatively low casualty toll.
Afterward, the market's few functioning shops promptly closed. The city's streets emptied, save for long lines of people outside the few bakeries with enough flour and generator fuel to make bread.
