DEIR AL BALAR, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces struck a school sheltering Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip early Thursday, killing more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said Hamas fighters were operating inside the school.
The attack came after the army announced new ground and air attacks on several refugee camps in central Gaza, tracking Hamas fighters who it said had regrouped there. It was the latest time the army has struck again in areas of the Gaza Strip it had previously overrun, highlighting the militant group’s tenacity despite Israeli attacks. About eight months of onslaught Within the territory.
The pre-dawn attack hit Al-Sardi School, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which serves Palestinians fleeing Israeli attacks and bombardment in northern Gaza, according to witnesses and hospital officials.
Ayman Rashid, who fled Gaza City and took refuge in the school, said missiles hit classrooms on the second and third floors where his family had taken shelter. He said he helped carry out five bodies, including an elderly man and two children, one of whom had his head crushed. “It was dark, there was no electricity and we struggled to rescue the victims,” Rashid said.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah admitted at least 33 people killed in the attack, including 14 children and nine women, according to hospital records and an Associated Press journalist at the hospital. An attack on another home killed six people overnight, records said. Both attacks took place in Nuseirat, one of several refugee camps set up in Gaza. 1948 War over the Creation of the State of IsraelHundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes in what became the new state.
Mohammed al-Kareem, a Palestinian refugee taking shelter near the hospital, described a chaotic scene outside. He said cars kept arriving and bewildered people rushed injured people into the emergency department. Videos circulating online appeared to show several injured people being treated on the hospital floor, a common scene in crowded medical wards in the Gaza Strip.
Footage showed bodies wrapped in blankets and plastic bags laid out in rows in the hospital’s courtyard, which was mostly dark as staff tried to conserve fuel for electricity. Al-Kareem said he saw people searching among the bodies for their loved ones, including one woman who repeatedly asked medical workers to unwrap a body to see if it was her son.
“The situation is dire,” he said.
The Israeli military said Hamas had set up a “commission” inside the school and that Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were using it as a hideout and planning attacks on Israeli forces, but did not immediately provide evidence. The military released photos of the school, pointing out classrooms on the second and third floors where it said fighters were located.
The country said it had taken steps before the attack to “reduce the risk of harm to innocent civilians, including aerial surveillance and additional intelligence gathering.”
UNRWA schools throughout the Gaza Strip have served as shelters since the start of the war, when most of the territory’s 2.3 million Palestinians were forced from their homes.
Israel launched its operation in Gaza in response to an October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took another 250 hostages. At least 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli attack, according to the report. Gaza Ministry of HealthThe statistics do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian deaths, saying it places fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in residential areas.
The United States is committed Gradual ceasefire and hostage release President Joe Biden outlined the plan last week, but Israel has said it will not end the war until Hamas is destroyed, while Hamas has demanded a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops.
The army said on Wednesday that its forces were conducting “both ground and underground” operations in eastern Deliverah and the Bureiji refugee camp in central Gaza. The operations began with air strikes on militant infrastructure, after which forces launched “targeted daytime operations” in both areas, it said.
Doctors Without Borders said at least 70 bodies and 300 wounded, mostly women and children, were taken to a hospital in central Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday after a series of Israeli attacks.
The international charity said in a post on X on Wednesday that Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was struggling to treat “a large number of patients arriving with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, fractures and other traumatic injuries.”
Gaza The health care system has almost collapsed. The hospital, which has survived through nearly eight months of war and treated about 700 wounded and sick people before the latest attack, said Wednesday that one of its two generators had stopped working, putting the operation of ventilators and incubators for premature babies at risk.
Israel has conducted regular air strikes across Gaza since the start of the war and has carried out major ground operations in the territory’s two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Yunis, leaving much of it in ruins.
The army launched a multi-week offensive earlier this year on Bureiji in central Gaza and several nearby refugee camps.
Troops withdrew from Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of fighting that caused widespread destruction. Emergency workers recovered the bodies of 360 people killed in the fighting, most of them women and children.
Israel sent troops to Rafah Israeli forces launched what they said was a limited incursion in May and are now operating in the center of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. Since the operation began, more than one million people have fled Rafah, many of them heading toward central Gaza.
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Magdy reported from Cairo.
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Read the AP report here https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
