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 Hamas.
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.
“Did the fetus fight Israel?”
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.
