Gura Pallay was watching another train pass by the one he was sitting in when he heard sudden, loud screeching. Before he could make sense of what was happening, he was thrown out of the train. Pallay, 24, landed next to the tracks along with metal wreckage of the train he’d been riding in, and instantly lost consciousness. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the twisted remains of three trains on the tracks. His train had derailed after colliding with a stopped freight train. Another passenger train, the one he had seen pass by moments earlier, had hit the derailed carriages. “I saw it with my own eyes, but I still can’t describe what I saw. I am haunted by it,” he said Sunday at a hospital, where he lay on a stretcher with a broken leg and dark wounds on his face and arms. Pallay is a laborer, like most of the people onboard the two passenger trains that crashed Friday in the eastern Odisha state, killing 275 people and injuring hundreds. He was traveling to Chennai city in southern India to take up a job in a paper mill factory when the Coromandel Express crashed with a goods freight train, knocking it off track, and was then hit by a second train coming from the opposite direction on a parallel track. Read: Error in signaling system led to train crash that killed 275 people in India, official says “I never imagined something like this could happen, but I guess it was our fate,” he said. Investigators said Sunday that a signaling failure might have caused the three-train crash, one of the worst rail disasters in the country’s history. Authorities recommended that India’s Central Bureau of Investigations, which probes major criminal cases, open an investigation into the crash. “We can’t bring back those we have lost, but the government is with the families in their grief. Whosoever is found guilty will be punished severely,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Saturday while visiting the site of the accident. The crash occurred as Modi’s government is focusing on the modernization of India’s British colonial-era railroad network. Several survivors of the crash said they were still struggling to comprehend the disaster. “Everything happened so quickly,” said Subhashish Patra, a student who was traveling with his family from Balasore to the state capital, Bhubaneswar, on the Coromandel Express. He was planning to take his mother to a hospital in Bhubaneswar to seek treatment for a hand injury, and then to travel to Puri, home to one of Odisha’s most important temples. Read: India’s deadly train crash renews questions over safety as government pushes railway upgrade The first thing Patra could make sense of after the crash was the sound of children crying. People were screaming for help in the dark, and around him lay corpses. “There were dead bodies all around me,” he said. Patra said the rail carriage he was in landed with the door facing upwards. He climbed onto a pile of wreckage inside the train and managed pull himself out. At the hospital on Sunday, Patra’s head was bandaged in gauze as he waited for an MRI scan. His head was throbbing with pain, he said, but he was grateful that he and his entire family had survived. Others weren’t so lucky. Alaudin, who goes by one name, travelled almost 200 kilometers (124.3 miles) Saturday from West Bengal state to the crash site, to look for his brother, who was onboard one of the trains. He learned about the crash from television. When he tried to call his brother’s mobile phone to check on him, no one answered. Worried, he and his sister-in-law rushed to the site of the crash afterwards and spent all of Saturday looking for him in various hospitals, hoping he would be alive. But his brother’s whereabouts remained unknown as the death toll continued to rise. Distraught, they finally made their way to the mortuary, where Alaudin’s brother body was wrapped in a black plastic bag and placed on top of blocks of melting ice. “I lost my brother, she lost her husband,” Alaudin said, pointing to his sister-in-law. “And his two boys have lost a father.” His brother was 36 years old, Alaudin said.  

Because he’ll shortly be deployed as a soldier on the battlefields of Ukraine, Serhiy Lipko and Anastasia Zukhvala chose to marry first, like a growing number of couples being torn asunder by war with Russia. Like others, their nuptials were rushed and smaller than they would have been during peacetime, with just a few dozen close friends and family. She wore a simple crown of blue flowers in her hair. And then, because laughter can be medicinal and because Lipko was building a career as a comic before the defense of his country called, they headed to a stand-up comedy club in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. There, with his new wife watching from the wings, he took the stage in olive-green fatigues and soon had the crowd in stitches with close-to-the-bone humor about army and married life. He joked that military training with NATO instructors had been a great opportunity for him to practice his English, and how nervous he’d been about handling expensive military gear, for fear of breaking it. The war isn’t remotely funny, but Ukrainians are learning to laugh about the awfulness of it all. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to — to stay sane in the brutality that has killed tens of thousands of people, is upending Ukraine, millions of lives and the world order as it rages on front lines in the east and south of the country. Read: Zelenskyy’s unlikely journey, from comedy to wartime leader Russian President Vladimir Putin and his troops, especially dead and wounded ones, are favorite targets of dark Ukrainian wartime humor. But there are red lines: Ukrainian dead aren’t laughed about and the grimmest battles, among them the brutal siege of Mariupol and the port city’s Azovstal steelworks, are far too raw for jokes. The same is true of atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere. “Tragedies cannot and will never be the object of humor,” said Zukhvala, who also works as a stand-up comic, as she and Lipko hugged with the tenderness of newlyweds after his show and scooped up armfuls of bouquets, wondering aloud how they’d find space for them at home. “This is an absolutely crazy time, beyond ordinary experience,” she said. “Our life now is made of paradoxes, and it can even be funny.” Ukraine’s most famous comedian is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now the country’s president, elected in 2019. In the TV comedy series “Servant of the People,” the former stand-up comic and actor played a lovable high school teacher who accidentally becomes president — before he later actually became one for real. But Zelenskyy hasn’t had much cause for comedy since the Feb. 24 invasion thrust him into the role of wartime leader. His daily video addresses to the nation are often grim and forceful.

Suzy Ishkontana hardly speaks or eats. It’s been two days since the 7-year-old girl was pulled from the rubble of what was once her family’s home, destroyed amid a barrage of Israeli airstrikes. She spent hours buried in the wreckage as her siblings and mother died around her. Children are being subjected to extensive trauma in Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip. For some, it’s trauma they’ve seen repeatedly throughout their short lives. This is the fourth time in 12 years Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers have gone to war. Each time, Israel has unleashed heavy airstrikes at the densely populated Gaza Strip as it vows to stop Hamas rocket barrages launched toward Israel. According to Gaza health officials, at least 63 children are among the 217 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza since the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas began on May 10. On the Israeli side, 12 people have been killed by Hamas rockets, all but one of them civilians, including a 5-year-old boy. Read:US reaches out to Arab leaders on Israel, Gaza fighting Israel says it does everything it can to prevent civilian casualties, including issuing warnings for people to evacuate buildings about to be struck. As Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, most of them intercepted by anti-missile defenses, Israel’s military has pounded hundreds of sites in Gaza, where some 2 million people live squeezed into a tight urban fabric. Videos on social media from Gaza have shown the grief of survivors from families wiped out in an instant. “They were four! Where are they? Four!” wailed one father outside a hospital after learning all four of his children had been killed. Another showed a young boy screaming “Baba,” as he ran to the front of the funeral procession where men were carrying his father’s body to burial. The Ishkontana family was buried under the rubble of their home early Sunday, after massive bombing raids of downtown Gaza City that Israel said were targeting a Hamas tunnel network. The strikes came without warning. Riad Ishkontana recounted to The Associated Press how he was buried for five hours under the wreckage, pinned under a chunk of concrete, unable to reach his wife and five children. “I was listening to their voices beneath the rubble. I heard Dana and Zain calling, ‘Dad! Dad!’ before their voices faded and then I realized they had died,” he said, referring to two of his children. After he was rescued and taken to the hospital, he said, family and staff hid the truth from him as long as they could. “I learned about their deaths one after another,” he said. Finally, Suzy was brought in alive, the second-oldest of his three daughters and two sons, and the only survivor. Though she had only limited physical bruising from her seven hours under the rubble, the young girl was in “severe trauma and shock,” said pediatrician Dr. Zuhair Al-Jaro. The hospital was unable to get her the psychological treatment she needs because of the ongoing fighting, he said. “She has entered into a deep depression,” he said. Only today, he said Tuesday, did she eat something after she was allowed briefly outside the hospital and saw her cousins. As her father spoke to the AP, Suzy sat on the bed next to him, silent and studying the faces of the people in the room but rarely making eye contact. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she turned away. When her father started to answer for her, saying she wanted to become a doctor, the girl began sobbing loudly. Read:Israel, Hamas trade fire in Gaza; Palestinians go on strike Ishkontana, 42, who recently stopped working as a waiter because of coronavirus lockdowns, said Suzy is smart and tech-savvy and loves smartphones and tablets. “She explores them, she has more experience dealing with them than I do,” he said. She also loves studying and would gather all her siblings into a play “class,” taking the role of their teacher, he said. The Ishkontanas were just one family destroyed that day. The strikes Sunday targeted Hamas tunnels running under Gaza City, the Israeli military said. The warplanes pounded al-Wahda Street, one of the city’s busiest commercial avenues, lined with apartment buildings with stores, bakeries, cafes and electronics shops on the ground floors. Three buildings collapsed, and multiple people from at least three families were killed. In all 42 people died, including 10 children and 16 women. Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, called the situation that led to the deaths “abnormal.” He said in one location the airstrikes caused a tunnel to collapse, bringing houses down with it, “and that caused a large amount of civilian casualties, which were not the aim.” He said the military was analyzing what happened and “attempting to recalibrate” its ordnance to prevent a reoccurrence. He said the bombing campaign targeting tunnel networks would be expanded to more areas of Gaza and that the military tries when possible to hit tunnels under roads rather than under houses. Israel and Hamas have fought similar conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014, each time wreaking heavy destruction The Norwegian Refugee Council said that 11 of the children killed so far in this war had been going through its psycho-social programs helping children deal with trauma — a sign of how children repeatedly are victimized by the violence. Among them was 8-year-old Dana, Suzy’s sister. “It’s the fourth time for many of them to experience” bombardment around their homes, said Hozayfa Yazji, the refugee council area field manager. Parents in Gaza desperately try to calm their terrified children, as bombs rain down, telling the youngest ones it’s just fireworks or trying to put up a cheerful front. Read:India calls for end to violence in Israel, Gaza The violence “will of course affect the psychology of these kids,” he said. “We are expecting that ... the situation will be much worse and more children will need more support.” The refugee council works with 118 schools in Gaza, reaching more than 75,000 students through its Better Learning Program. The program trains teachers to deal with traumatized children and organizes fun exercises to relieve stress. It also does home-checks on children to provide help. The council’s secretary-general, Jan Egeland, called for an immediate cease-fire, saying, “Spare these children and their families. Stop bombing them now.” But he said, longer term, an end to the blockade on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory is necessary “if we are to avoid more trauma and death among children.”