CAIRO: An Israeli airstrike hit a school-turned-shelter in Gaza, killing at least 80 people, a Palestinian health official said on Saturday. He said it was one of the deadliest strikes in the 10-month-old war between Israel and Hamas.
The Israeli military acknowledged that the strike was carried out at the Tabeen school in central Gaza, claiming that it hit a Hamas command centre within the school. However, Hamas has denied the claims regarding the centre. There have been reports of increasing Israeli attacks on Gaza’s schools, which have become shelters for people who have been forced to flee their homes by the war.
Video from the scene showed walls blown out on the ground level of a large building. Concrete chunks and twisted metal lay atop the blood-soaked floor, along with clothing, toppled furniture and other debris. A blackened car with windows blown out was covered in rubble.
Fadel Naeem, the director of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, said the facility received 70 bodies of those killed in the strike and body parts of at least 10 others. The Health Ministry said another 47 people were wounded. Naeem said some of the wounded had severe burns and many had to have their limbs amputated. “We received some of the most serious injuries we have encountered during the war,” he said.
The strike hit without warning in the early morning before sunrise as people were praying at a mosque inside the school, said Abu Anas, a witness. “There were people praying, while some were sleeping, including children, women and old people,” he said. “The missile fell on them without warning. The first missile, and then the second. We recovered them as body parts.”
In a report issued on Monday, the UN Human Rights Office said there were at least 17 attacks on schools in the previous month seven of them in the past eight days that reportedly killed 163 people, many of them women and children.
According to the report, many of the schools were serving as shelters. “There’s no justification for these massacres,” European Union (UN) foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement posted on social media platform X, in reference to the strikes on schools.
The UN said as of July 6, 477 out of 564 schools in Gaza had been directly hit or damaged in the war.
According to hospital officials, Israel’s military hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the eastern Gaza city on Thursday, killing at least 15 people. Israel has blamed civilian deaths in Gaza on Hamas, saying the group endangered non-combatants by using schools and residential neighbourhoods as bases for operations and attacks.
Israeli intelligence indicated nearly 20 militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including senior commanders, were using the Tabeen school compound to plan attacks on Israeli forces, said Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman. Izzat al-Rishq, a top Hamas official, denied that there were militants in the school.
Egypt, which borders Gaza and serves as a key mediator, said the strike on the school showed that Israel had no intention of reaching a cease-fire deal and ending the war.