In a widely shared video clip, Abed Bardini is heard screaming in grief when he realizes that it is his mother lying dead on the stretcher.
Oh God, I swear - it's my mother! I didn't know it was her!
He wails over his mother's body, refusing to let her go as his colleagues try to roll the stretcher away. A colleague tries to comfort him awkwardly.
Ambulance nurse Bardini had unknowingly sat beside his dead mother, wrapped in a white sheet, as they drove along the bombed-out roads from Maghazi to al-Aqsa Hospital in Dayr al-Balah. When a doctor pulled back the sheet to look for vital signs, he collapsed.
In the video clip, published by, among others, Al Jazeera, Bardini is seen in tears as he calls his sister with the news: mom has been killed.
I picked her up, but I didn't recognize her. It wasn't until we got to the hospital that I realized it was her, he says in the phone call with a broken voice.
Three people were killed and about ten injured in Wednesday's Israeli attack on a car in Maghazi, according to medical sources and the AP news agency's team on the spot.
Two of the dead were in the car, and the third victim, 61-year-old Samira Bardini, was standing nearby when the bomb fell.
Israel has not commented on the attack in question.