An Israeli attack early Thursday on a school housing displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials. The hospital treating the victims said it had received the bodies of at least “37 martyrs” of the strike, according to Agence France-Presse. But a UN official tells Reuters the death toll is between 35 and 45, although it is still unable to confirm figures.
The Israeli military said Hamas militants were operating from the school.
The strike came as US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators resumed talks on an agreement on a ceasefire and the release of hostages.
The attack also came after the army announced a new ground and air assault on several refugee camps in central Gaza, pursuing Hamas militants who are believed to have regrouped there.
It is the latest example of troops retreating into parts of the Gaza Strip they previously invaded, underscoring the militant group’s resilience despite Israel’s nearly eight-month assault on the area.
Witnesses and hospital officials said the pre-dawn strike hit the al-Sardi school, run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known by its acronym UNRWA. The school was full of Palestinians who had fled Israeli offensives and bombardments in northern Gaza, they said.
ReutersTV/REUTERS
Ayman Rashed, a displaced man from Gaza City who took shelter in the school, said the rockets hit classrooms on the second and third floors where families were sheltering. He said he helped transport five dead, including an old man and two children, one with his head cracked open. “It was dark, without electricity, and we had difficulty getting the victims out,” Rashed said.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah received at least 33 deaths from the strike, including 14 children and nine women, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter at the hospital. Another attack on a house killed six people overnight, according to data. Both attacks took place in Nuseirat, one of several built-up refugee camps in Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what would become the new state.
Mohammed al-Kareem, a displaced Palestinian shelter near the hospital, described chaotic scenes outside the facility. He said vehicles arrived one after another as distressed people took injured people to the emergency department. Videos circulating online appeared to show several wounded people being treated on the hospital floor, a common scene in Gaza’s overwhelmed medical wards.
Footage showed bodies wrapped in blankets or plastic bags being laid out in rows in the hospital courtyard, which was largely dark as staff tried to save limited fuel for electricity. Al-Kareem said he saw people searching among the bodies for their loved ones and that one woman kept asking medical workers to open the wrappers around the bodies to see if her son was inside.
“The situation is tragic,” he said.
The Israeli military said Hamas had embedded a “compound” in the school and that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants used it as a hideout where they planned attacks on Israeli forces, although there was no immediate evidence of this. It published a photo of the school, pointing to classrooms on the second and third floors where militants were located.
It said it had taken steps before the attack “to reduce the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians … including conducting aerial surveillance and additional intelligence information.”
UNRWA schools in Gaza have functioned as shelters since the start of the war, driving most of the area’s 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes.
Israel launched its campaign in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. The Israeli offensive has killed at least 36,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its figures.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian deaths because it positions fighter planes, tunnels and rocket launchers in residential areas.
The United States has expressed support for a phased ceasefire and the release of hostages that President Biden outlined last week. But Israel says it will not end the war without destroying Hamas, with the militant group demanding a lasting ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces.
The army said on Wednesday that troops were operating “both above and below ground” in eastern parts of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. It said the operation began with airstrikes on militant infrastructure, after which troops began a “targeted daylight operation” in both areas.
Doctors Without Borders said at least 70 bodies and 300 injured people, mostly women and children, were taken to a hospital in central Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday after a wave of Israeli attacks.
The international charity said in a post on
Gaza’s healthcare system has nearly collapsed due to almost eight months of war. The hospital, which treated some 700 injured and sick people before the latest strikes, said on Wednesday that one of its two electrical generators stopped working, threatening its ability to continue using ventilators and incubators for premature babies.
Israel has routinely launched airstrikes in all parts of Gaza since the war began and has carried out large-scale ground operations in the territory’s two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Younis, leaving much of it in ruins.
The army waged a weeks-long offensive in Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza earlier this year.
Troops withdrew from the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction. First responders have recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, killed in the fighting.
Israel has sent troops to Rafah in May, they said it was a limited incursion, but these forces are now operating in central parts of Gaza’s southernmost city. Since the start of the operation, more than 1 million people have fled Rafah, many of them towards central Gaza.
