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Iman al-Nouri’s youngest son, two-year-old Siraj, woke up crying from hunger on Thursday and asked to get some nutritional supplements.

Siraj’s 14-year-old cousin, Sama, agreed to take him and two of his older brothers – Omar, nine, and Amir, five – to the Altayara health clinic in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

“The [medical] point was still closed, so they were sitting on the pavement when suddenly we heard the sound of the strike,” Iman told a local journalist working for the BBC.

“I went to [my husband] and said: ‘Your children, Hatim! They went to the point.’”

Warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of death and violence

Iman, a 32-year-old mother of five, rushed to the scene after hearing the strike, only to find her sons and niece lying on a donkey cart that was being used to transport casualties to the hospital because there were no ambulances.

Amir and Sama were among the dead, while Omar and Siraj were seriously wounded.

“Omar still had some breath in him. They tried to revive him,” Iman recalled. “Omar needed blood, and it took them an hour to get it. They gave it to him, but it was in vain.”

“Why are they gone? Why? What did they do wrong?” she asked.

“They had dreams just like any other children in the world. If you gave them a small toy, they’d be so happy. They were just kids.”

Iman said Siraj’s head was bleeding and he had lost an eye – an image that she cannot now get out of her head.

“He had fractures in his skull and… according to the doctor, not just bleeding, but [a major haemorrhage] on his brain,” she added. “How long can he stay like this, living on oxygen? Two are already gone. If only he could help me hold on a little longer.”

Tragically, doctors have said they are unable to treat Siraj.

“Since yesterday at 07:00 until now, he’s in the same condition. He’s still breathing, his chest rises and falls, he still has breath in him. Save him!” she pleaded.

A spokesperson for the US-based aid group Project Hope, which runs the Altayara clinic, told the BBC that the strike happened at around 07:15.

Women and children were waiting outside before it opened at 09:00, in order to be first in line for nutrition and other health services, Dr Mithqal Abutaha said.

CCTV footage of the Israeli air strike shows two men walking along a street, just metres away from a group of women and children. Moments later, there is an explosion next to the men and the air is filled with dust and smoke.

In a graphic video showing the aftermath of the attack, many dead and severely wounded children and adults are seen lying on the ground.

“Please get my daughter an ambulance,” one woman calls out as she tends to a young girl. But for many it was too late for help.”

Dr Abutaha said 16 people were killed, including 10 children and three women.

The Israeli military said it targeted a “Hamas terrorist” and that it regretted any harm to what it called “uninvolved individuals”, while adding that the incident was under review.

Project Hope said the strike was “a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, and a stark reminder that no one and no place is safe in Gaza”.

Dr Abutaha said it was “unbearable” when he found out that people were killed “where they [were] seeking their basic humanitarian and human rights”.

He questioned the Israeli military’s statement on the strike, including its expression of regret, saying that it “cannot bring those patients, those beneficiaries back alive”.

He also said that the clinic was a UN-recognised, “deconflicted humanitarian facility”, and that no military actions should have taken place nearby.

Iman said her children used to go to the clinic every two or three days to get nutritional supplements because she and Hatim were not able to give them enough food.

“Their father risks his life just to bring them flour. When he goes to Netzarim [military corridor north of Deir al-Balah], my heart breaks. He goes there to bring food or flour.”

“Does anyone have anything? There’s no food. What else would make a child scream if he didn’t want something?”

Israel imposed a total blockade of aid deliveries to Gaza at the start of March and resumed its military offensive against Hamas two weeks later, collapsing a two-month ceasefire. It said it wanted to put pressure on the Palestinian armed group to release Israeli hostages.

Although the blockade was partially eased in late May, amid warnings of a looming famine from global experts, there are still severe shortages of food, as well as medicine and fuel.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) says there are thousands of malnourished children across the territory, with more cases detected every day.

Dr Abutaha said Project Hope had also noticed an alarming rise in cases of malnutrition among adults, which they had not observed before in Gaza.

In addition to allowing in some UN aid lorries, Israel and the US helped set up a new aid distribution system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), saying they wanted to prevent Hamas from stealing aid. But since then, there have been almost daily reports of people being killed by Israeli fire while seeking food.

The UN human rights office said on Friday that it had so far recorded 798 such killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the GHF’s sites, which are operated by US private security contractors and located inside military zones in southern and central Gaza. The other 183 killings were recorded near UN and other aid convoys.

The Israeli military said it recognised there had been incidents in which civilians had been harmed and that it was working to minimise “possible friction between the population and the [Israeli] forces as much as possible”.

The GHF accused the UN of using “false and misleading” statistics from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Dr Abutaha called on Israel to allow in enough food, medicine and fuel to meet the basic humanitarian needs of everyone in Gaza, so that “everyone could have a dignified life”.

He also expressed concern that people were being given “false hope” that Israel and Hamas could soon agree a new ceasefire deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that an agreement on a 60-day truce and the release of 28 hostages could be just days away.

But Palestinian officials said on Friday night that the indirect talks in Qatar were on the brink of collapse because of significant gaps remaining on issues like Israeli troop withdrawals and Hamas’s rejection of an Israeli plan to move all of Gaza’s population into a camp in Rafah.

“Every day they talk about a ceasefire, but where is it?” Iman said.

“They’ve killed us through hunger, through gunfire, through bombs, through air strikes. We’ve died in every possible way.”

“It’s better to go to God than stay with any of them. May God give me patience.”

It wasn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill royal occasion.

In the sunny gardens of the Highgrove estate, I stood in a circle with King Charles and an eclectic group who were attending his first “Harmony Summit”.

We raised our arms in honour of nature as we stood around a fire, which was burning within a ring of flowers.

Presiding over the fire ceremony, in which we rotated as we honoured the north, south, east and west and then Mother Earth, was an Indigenous leader – an Earth Elder – wearing a headdress and a dazzling robe of blue feathers.

A conch shell was blown. Butterflies flew around the flowers. And, in a concession to modernity, as well as holding up feathers in a blessing for the King, the elder was reading his incantations from an iPhone.

There were people reaching to the sky, wearing colourful face paint and elaborate necklaces, while I held my palms up self-consciously, melting in my M&S suit.

The summit was a celebration of the King’s philosophy of harmony with nature – an inaugural event that the King’s Foundation hopes will become a regular gathering.

It brought together representatives from Indigenous peoples, including from tribes in the Amazon, along with environmentalists, climate campaigners, organic farmers, herbalists, educators, crafts people and philanthropists.

For good measure, there was Dwight from the US version of The Office, or at least actor Rainn Wilson, a director of a climate change group.

There were other visitors from Amazon too. A film crew from Amazon Prime, making a documentary for next year, who were poring over every moment as the sacred smoke coiled up over the apple trees in Gloucestershire.

The King, in a light summer suit, spoke a few quiet words of welcome, wearing a circlet of feathers and a scarf that had been draped ceremonially around his shoulders.

A humane, ruminative, humorous and quietly radical figure, he was at the centre of what he hopes will become the first of many such gatherings.

But it raised the question – and perhaps opened a window – into what the King believes. What is this thoughtful man really thinking about?

Harmony is the King’s philosophy, it means that we should be working with the grain of nature rather than against it. Or “her” as, he describes nature, in his book on the subject, published in 2010.

It’s about the inter-connectedness of all life, infused with a strong sense of the spiritual, and the idea that the human and natural worlds can’t be separated.

It’s the philosophy that stitches together his many different pursuits – on the environment, climate change, sustainable farming, urban planning, architecture, protecting traditional craft skills and building bridges between different faiths.

According to a source close to the King, it’s “perhaps the single most important part of his eventual legacy”, bringing together different strands of his work that might seem separate into “one philosophical world view about creating a better, more sustainable world for future generations”.

The King’s views, including on the environment, were “once seen as an outlier, but now many elements have been accepted and adopted as conventional thought and mainstream practice, embraced around the world”.

In his book on Harmony – A New Way of Looking at our World, the King describes his purpose as a “call to revolution”, and writes that he recognises the strength of the word.

It’s a broadside against a consumer culture, in which people and the natural world become commodities. He warns of the environmental threats to the future of the Earth. There’s a call to protect traditional crafts and skills and also for a radical change in rejecting modern, unsustainable, exploitative forms of farming.

If not avant garde, he’s an avant gardener.

If you go for a walk in Highgrove’s gardens there are small hurdle fences, with wooden rods woven around posts. The King makes these himself and this idea of things being inextricably woven together seems to be central to harmony.

His book moves from the importance of geometry, with patterns rooted in nature, to the designs in Islamic art and the inspiring dimensions of Gothic cathedrals.

A sense of the sacred in nature, as well as in people, seems to be an important part of this world view.

At lunch at the Harmony Summit, grace was said by the Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher.

The King’s idea of harmony dovetailed with a very deep personal Christian faith, he said.

“My sense is that he draws much of his energy and ideas from spending time in prayer and contemplation,” said the bishop.

He said the King sees his role as serving others and a sense of this “is seen in how he is always keen to learn from other religious traditions, building bridges and fostering good relationships built on respect and understanding”.

Within strands of Christianity, the King is also said to be have been interested in the Orthodox faith and its use of icons.

Highgrove itself has an example of the King’s private sense of spirituality. There is a small sanctuary tucked away in the grounds, where no one else goes inside, where he can spend time completely alone with this thoughts.

It must seem a world away from the ceremonial juggernaut of this week’s state visit by France’s President Macron.

The focus of this inaugural Harmony Summit was drawing on the wisdom of indigenous people, tapping into their knowledge and pre-industrial ways of working with nature.

Survivalist Ray Mears was there to welcome representatives of the Earth Elders group, who work to defend the rights of “original peoples”, who have become the threatened guardians of the natural world. They were wearing traditional headdresses, face paint and ornaments, in among the flowers and trees of Highgrove.

“People’s selfishness has taken them away from nature. They can’t feel the breeze, they’re too focused on the clock,” said Mindahi Bastida, of the Otomi-Toltec people in Mexico.

The cacophonous modern world has broken our connection with nature, said Rutendo Ngara, from South Africa. She described our era as a time of “loud forgetting”.

“We all have egos and ambitions. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to sell out,” said Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai, from Ecuador, the co-ordinator for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance.

The temptation for him was to sell his land for oil. He decided a different path and explained what “harmony” now meant to him.

“It’s well-being for all human beings, all living beings, visible and invisible, it’s Mother Nature… Everything is connected and there’s mutual respect,” he said.

These were people from forests and rivers who talked of the destructive pressures on them, from mining, oil and urbanisation.

They weren’t pulling punches either. There were speakers warning of how “Europeans” had killed their people and another who said that the much-hyped COP climate change gatherings were full of empty promises that never delivered for grassroots communities.

Ailton Krenak, from Brazil, talked of rivers that that had been “erased by money” and seeing the dried-up, polluted waterways was like a much-loved “grandfather in a coma”.

But how can harmony work in such a discordant world?

Richard Dunne, who runs the educational Harmony Project which uses the concept in more than 100 schools in the UK, has been applying the principles in a place of extreme conflict, the war in Ukraine.

He’s been taking classes of children traumatised by the conflict, and reconnecting them with nature, taking them to parks and forests for a place to heal.

“Ukraine is a powerful example of a country that’s in a war they don’t want and they are losing a lot of people. It’s terrible, there’s a lot of pain and suffering. And they want harmony, a future of living well together, so the message of harmony really resonates there,” he said.

Highgrove, winningly wobbly with its crooked tiles and trees growing through holes in the roof of a shelter, is a lyrical sight on a summer’s day. It’s a model of harmony with nature.

How does that message work, when you step outside into an often angry, noisy and brutal world?

What makes the idea of harmony relevant, is that it puts ideas into practice, it’s not just a “thought exercise”, says Simon Sadinsky, executive education director at the King’s Foundation, which teaches crafts skills to a new generation.

“It’s not just a theoretical concept, it’s not just a philosophy, it’s grounded in practice,” says Dr Sadinsky.

“There’s a lot of awfulness going on in the world, it’s hard to stay optimistic. You can feel completely powerless,” says Beth Somerville, a textile worker who completed a King’s Foundation course.

But she says the idea of “harmony in nature” inspires her work and helps to create things which can be both beautiful and functional, in a way that is “all connected”.

“It does drive me to carry on and have hope,” she says.