Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on school-turned-shelter killed 21
Gaza's civil defence agency reported 21 killed in an Israeli
strike on Saturday, the latest attack on a school sheltering displaced
Palestinians where the Israeli military said it targeted militants.
A spokesman for the civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal,
said more than half the dead at the Gaza City school were children. According
to witnesses, a group of orphans had earlier gathered at the building to
receive sponsorship from a local aid group.
"Civil defence crews recovered (the bodies of) 21
people, including 13 children and six women", one of whom was pregnant,
said Bassal.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip gave the
same death toll for what the Israeli military said was "a precise strike
on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command-and-control centre...
embedded inside" an adjacent school.
AFPTV footage showed the ground floor of the
school-turned-shelter covered with concrete rubble and mangled chairs and
tables, and a gaping hole in the ceiling of what appeared to be a classroom.
Thousands of Palestinians displaced by the Israel-Hamas war
had sought shelter there, Bassal said.
There were "around 30 injured, including nine children
(needing) limb amputations, as a result of an Israeli bombing on Al-Zeitun
School C" in Gaza City, he said.
Israel's military said its target was in Al-Falah School,
adjacent to the Al-Zeitun School buildings.
An AFP reporter at the scene confirmed that Al-Zeitun School
C had been hit.
The military, without mentioning the casualties reported by
Gaza's civil defence and health ministry, said it had taken steps "to
mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions,
aerial surveillance and additional intelligence".
Displaced Gazan Randa al-Nadim told AFP she saw a pregnant
woman killed in the strike.
"Here a woman was martyred, and this is her blood on
the stairs... we found her belly open and the fetus on the stairs," she
said.
It was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes on school
buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged on for
nearly a year since Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel.
A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni School in
central Gaza on September 11 drew international outcry after the UN agency for
Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said six of its staffers were among the 18
reported fatalities.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in school
buildings where many thousands of Gazans have sought shelter -- a charge denied
by the Palestinian militant group.
Hamas on Saturday condemned the strike on Al-Zeitun School
C, describing it in a statement as "a war crime under American
cover", a reference to Washington being Israel's most important military
backer.
The vast majority of the Gaza Strip's 2.4 million people
have been displaced at least once by the ongoing war, which was triggered by
the October 7 attack.
In a separate incident on Saturday, Gaza's health ministry
said an Israeli air strike hit a warehouse in a "densely populated"
area in the south, killing "three health ministry personnel and a
passer-by" and injuring six others.
"The warehouse was directly targeted with several
missiles while doctors and staff were performing their duties, preparing to
transport the medicines stored there to hospitals... that are facing severe
shortages," a statement said.
Israel's military had no immediate comment on the warehouse
strike.
At least 41,391 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians,
have been killed in Israel's military campaign in Gaza since the war began,
according to data provided by the health ministry. The United Nations
has acknowledged these figures as reliable.
Hamas's October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205
people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally
based on official Israeli figures, which includes hostages killed in captivity.
Out of 251 people taken hostage that day, 97 are still being
held inside the Gaza Strip, including 33 who the Israeli military says are
dead.
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