Israeli airstrike kills dozens in Gaza school converted into emergency shelter

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – An Israeli attack early Thursday on a school converted into a makeshift shelter in central Gaza that the military said was being used as a Hamas compound killed at least 30 people, including five children, according to local health officials.

The attack came after the military announced it would launch new air and ground operations in central Gaza, an apparent expansion of the nearly eight-month-long offensive that began after Hamas’s attack on October 7. An international medical aid organization had already reported rising casualty numbers before Thursday’s attack.

At least 30 bodies were found in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the attack on the school run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). Another six were found in another attack on a residential building, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter. Hamas-run television had previously reported a higher death toll.

Mohammed al-Kareem, a displaced Palestinian who has sought refuge near the hospital, described chaotic scenes outside the facility. He said vehicle after vehicle drove up as desperate people rushed injured people to the emergency room. Videos circulating online appear to show several injured people being treated on the hospital floor – a common sight in Gaza’s overburdened medical wards.

Read more: The horrors I have seen in the treatment of patients in the remaining hospitals in the Gaza Strip

He later saw people searching for their relatives among bodies wrapped in white shrouds in the hospital courtyard. He said one woman kept asking medical staff to cut open the bodies to see if her son was inside.

“The situation is tragic,” he said.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets attacked the school, which Hamas and Islamic Jihad used as a cover for their operations, without immediately providing evidence.

Since the beginning of the war, which led to the flight of a large proportion of the area’s 2.3 million Palestinians, UNRWA schools throughout the Gaza Strip have served as emergency shelters.

“A number of steps were taken prior to the attack to reduce the risk of harm to innocent civilians during the attack, including conducting aerial surveillance and gathering additional intelligence,” the Israeli military said.

Both attacks took place in Nuseirat, one of several refugee camps in the Gaza Strip that date back to the war for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the territory that is now the new state.

The latest war began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, in which the militants killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. According to the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry, at least 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive. In its figures, the ministry makes no distinction between fighters and civilians.

Read more: What we know about the death toll in the Gaza Strip

Israel says it is taking measures to prevent civilians from being harmed and blames Hamas for their deaths by positioning fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in residential areas. The military has made little comment on isolated attacks that often kill women and children.

The United States has pushed for a gradual ceasefire and hostage release announced by President Joe Biden last week, while Israel says it will not end the war without destroying Hamas, while the militant group demands a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces.

The military said on Wednesday that forces were operating “both above and underground” in eastern parts of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. It said the operation began with air strikes on militants’ infrastructure, after which troops launched a “targeted daylight operation” in both areas.

Doctors Without Borders said at least 70 bodies and 300 injured people, mostly women and children, were brought to a hospital in central Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday following a wave of Israeli attacks.

The international aid organization said in a post on X on Wednesday that Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital was overwhelmed with treating a “huge influx of patients, many of whom are arriving with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, broken bones and other traumatic injuries.”

The Gaza Strip’s health system has almost collapsed after almost eight months of war. The hospital, which treated around 700 wounded and sick before the recent attacks, announced on Wednesday that one of its two generators had stopped working, jeopardizing the hospital’s ability to continue operating ventilators and incubators for premature babies.

Read more: The fight to save lives in Gaza’s hospitals

Israel has carried out regular air strikes on all parts of the Gaza Strip since the war began and has conducted massive ground operations in the territory’s two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Younis, leaving large parts of it in ruins.

The military launched an offensive in Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza for several weeks earlier this year.

Last Friday, troops withdrew from the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction. Rescue workers have recovered the bodies of 360 people, most of them women and children, killed during the fighting.

Israel sent troops to Rafah in May, ostensibly on a limited basis, but now those forces are operating in central parts of Gaza’s southernmost city. Since the operation began, more than a million people have fled Rafah, many of them heading for central Gaza.

—Magdy reported from Cairo.