Lieut Mahmoud al Banna and his comrades ran in panic when they heard the Israeli F-16s. Sheets of glass crashed around them on the Gaza seafront road and the men collided in the dark. When they returned to President Yasser Arafat's naval police headquarters yesterday, they found their building flattened.
Broken furniture lay hundreds of metres away, amid tonnes of grey rubble.
The bombing was but the latest in a long list of humiliations.
"The only thing 'naval' about us is the name," Lieut al Banna admitted. "We have no boats. The Israelis forbid us going to sea. If we go to the fishing port, an Israeli gunboat fires on us."
Three of the young officer's close friends have been killed in Israeli attacks in as many weeks. "We have so many martyrs and wounded that we lose track," he said.
"I take medicine to sleep. We have nothing, Kalashnikovs but no missiles. They have destroyed us."
The Israelis fired 30 missiles into the Gaza Strip overnight. When the bombardment subsided, occupation troops paralysed the small enclave by cutting it into in four sections.
"We have orders to do nothing," Lieut al Banna said. "We can't stand it any longer; we have to defend ourselves, even with pebbles."
Policemen were salvaging sofas and chairs, photocopiers and electric fans, from the Gaza Strip's central police headquarters, bombed for the fifth time by the Israelis. Gen Ghazi al Jebaili, the chief of all Palestinian police, has been on the run since before the intifada. The Israelis accuse him of ordering policemen to fire on a settlement.
The latest bombardments destroyed Gen al Jebaili's office.
In the private house he now works from, Gen al Jebaili's deputy, BrigGen Mahmood Said Asfour, began recounting the night's destruction.
An aide brought him a note as we talked; the Israelis had just destroyed the Palestinian radio and television transmission tower in Ramallah.
"Sharon is trying to create anarchy, total instability, in all the Palestinian territories," Gen Asfour said.
Gen Asfour's men were closing Hamas and Islamic Jihad facilities "for the tranquility and security of Palestinians" - not to please the Israelis.
"Their clinics will be taken over by the [Palestinian] health ministry. The Ministry of Education will take charge of their nursery schools.
"We have people inside the [Islamic] universities, trying to control them. We keep an eye on the sheikhs in the mosques, to prevent them making inflammatory statements . . . If we let Hamas and Islamic Jihad do what they want, they will lead us to the internal chaos that Sharon is trying to create."
Israelis and Palestinians have never been in such deep crisis, Mr Arafat's spokesman, Mr Marwan Kanafani, said. "We used to fight, we used to separate. But this time it's divorce."
Mr Kanafani accused the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, of using the first two conditions of Senator George Mitchell's peace plan - a ceasefire and period of calm - to avoid implementing the third: a freeze on Israeli settlements. "Every time things are quiet, he assassinates someone to break the calm."
Mr Kanafani described Mr Arafat as "a very religious man who has a spiritual conviction of predestination".
The Palestinian President was not worried. "He is in full contact with the organs of the Palestinian Authority." In the previous 24 hours, Mr Arafat had spoken with the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, the EU's foreign representative, Mr Javier Solana, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Now that Mr Sharon has broken off all contact, the Palestinian Authority was appealing to the "international community" to dictate a solution. "We failed to find a way out on our own," Mr Kanafani said.
"There is no common ground. Mr Sharon wants to break the Palestinian people and force President Arafat to sign something unacceptable."
Despite the US bias in favour of Israel, Mr Kanafani said the Palestinians must put themselves at the mercy of the Americans.
"The US is the only go-between acceptable not only to Israel and Arabs, but to Russians, the EU, the Chinese. Each time we appeal to one of these parties, they say, 'Go talk to the Americans'.
"This exclusivity was imposed on us; it's imposed on everybody in the world."