The Israeli military claimed to have attacked a Hamas command center on Tuesday, but Gaza’s civil defense service said that at least 12 civilians were killed in an Israeli strike on a school converted to a shelter.
“Our crews retrieved 12 martyrs from the Mustafa Hafiz school, which was bombed by the Israeli occupation west of Gaza City,” agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
He added that thousands of Palestinians who were displaced due to the continuing Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip had taken sanctuary in the school.
The school was targeted, according to the Israeli military, because it had a command-and-control center.
“Hamas terrorists used the command-and-control centre to plan and execute attacks against IDF (Israeli army) troops and the State of Israel,” the military said in a statement.
It declared that it executed a “precise strike on terrorists who were operating” within the educational institution.
In an earlier statement, Bassal claimed that the strike had struck the school building’s second level and left seven people dead and fifteen wounded.
It was not possible to independently confirm the most recent death toll figure.
AFP photographs showed the school in ruins and scores of Palestinian men and women, many of whom were carrying children, running from the scene of the attack.
The Israeli military has attacked multiple schools in Gaza in recent weeks, mostly in Gaza City. The accusation is that the schools house Hamas command centers, a claim that the Islamist organization disputes.
The civil defense agency reports that the military hit the Al-Tabieen School in Gaza City earlier this month, killing 93 Palestinians, while the military claims that 31 militants perished.
When Palestinian terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out, and tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians sought safety in schools.
1,199 people died as a result of that strike, the majority of them were civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli government statistics.
Additionally, 251 persons were taken prisoner by militants; 105 of them are still detained in Gaza, 34 of whom the military claims are deceased.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive against Hamas has killed at least 40,173 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
Most of the dead in Gaza are women and children, according to the UN human rights office.
