Palestinian health officials said an Israeli airstrike struck a school shelter in Gaza City early Saturday morning, killing at least 80 people, one of the deadliest strikes in the 10-month war between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel and Hamas.
According to Abu Anas, a witness who was involved in the rescue operation, the strike happened without warning in the early morning before sunrise while people were praying at the school’s mosque.
“There were people praying, there were people washing, there were people sleeping upstairs, there were children, women, old people,” he said. “The missiles hit them without warning. The first missile, the second missile. We recovered them as body parts.”
Three missiles destroyed the school and the mosque inside it. 6,000 immigrants “People were seeking refuge from the fighting,” said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the civil defense corps that operates under the Hamas-run local government.
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The Israeli military has confirmed the strike, claiming it hit a Hamas command center inside the school. Hamas denies it.
Bassal said many of the dead were unrecognizable and added that he expected the death toll to rise. Many casualties were Women and childrenHe said.
Footage from the scene showed a wall blown off the first floor of a large building. Chunks of concrete and twisted metal lay on the blood-soaked floor, along with clothes, torn furniture, and other debris. A charred car with its windows blown out was covered in debris.
The Health Ministry said 47 people were wounded in the attack on Tabin School in central Gaza City. The facility, like almost all schools in the Gaza Strip, Used as a shelter For those who have fled their homes due to war.
Fadel Naim, the director of Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, told The Associated Press that the hospital received 70 bodies and body parts of at least 10 people killed in the airstrikes.
According to the UN, as of July 6, 477 of the 564 schools in Gaza had been directly hit or damaged by the war. In June, an Israeli airstrike on a school housing Palestinian settlers in central Gaza killed at least 33 people, including 12 women and children, according to local health authorities.
Israeli Army on Thursday Attack on two schools that protect immigrants At least 15 people were killed in the blast in eastern Gaza City, according to hospital officials.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian deaths in Gaza, accusing it of using schools and residential areas as bases for operations and attacks, putting non-combatants at risk.
Israeli intelligence said about 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including senior commanders, were planning to use the Tabin school complex to attack Israeli forces, Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said in a statement on the social media platform X.
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Shoshani also questioned the casualty figures released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Izzat Alishq, a senior Hamas official, denied there were any militants at the school.
Israel said the targeted school was located next to a mosque that serves as a shelter for Gaza civilians.
But the AP cameraman said the mosque and the school were in the same building, with a prayer hall on the ground floor and a school above. The missile appeared to have gone through the floor of the school, into the mosque below, and then exploded, according to the cameraman.
The strikes come as mediators from the United States, Qatar and Egypt are pressuring the two sides to reach a ceasefire agreement that could help calm surging tensions in the region following the assassination of Hamas’ top political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.
Egypt, which borders Gaza and is a key mediator, said the school strikes showed Israel had no intention of reaching a ceasefire and ending the war.
Neighboring Jordan also condemned the attack, calling it a “blatant violation” of international law.
Abdel Karim Hana/AP
At least 13 people, including three children and seven women, were killed in two separate airstrikes in central Gaza late Friday, hospital authorities said. An Associated Press reporter counts bodies at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah.
A hospital official said an airstrike hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing seven people, all but one of whom were women. Another airstrike hit a house in Deir al-Balah, killing six people, including a woman and her three children.
More than 39,600 Palestinians have been killed and 91,700 wounded in Israel’s Gaza campaign, the region’s health ministry said. The war began with an October 7 attack by Hamas, in which militants from Gaza stormed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping 250.
Of the pre-war population of 2.3 million in Gaza, more than 1.9 million have been forced from their homes and repeatedly fled across the territory to escape the offensive. Most are now crammed into shabby tent camps spread across about 19 square miles of Gaza’s coast.
