At least 16 dead in Israeli air strike on school in Gaza Strip

According to Palestinian authorities, at least 16 people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a UN school in the Gaza Strip and dozens more were injured.

According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, the building housed thousands of displaced people from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

Israel said it had hit several Hamas terrorists who were “operating in buildings in the area of ​​the Al-Jaouni school.”

A local source said the target was a room allegedly used by Hamas police. A spokeswoman for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said the allegations were “very, very serious” and needed to be investigated.

Israel has announced that it will send a negotiating team next week to negotiate a hostage release with Hamas.

A senior US government official had previously said that Hamas had agreed to make “fairly significant adjustments” to its position regarding a possible ceasefire.

A senior Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday that the group had agreed to begin talks on the release of Israeli hostages 16 days after the planned first phase of a deal to end the Gaza war.

A video from the site of the school strike in Nuseirat shows screaming adults and children in a smoke-filled street covered in dust and debris as they rush to help the injured.

Eyewitnesses told the BBC that the attack targeted the upper floors of the school, which is located near a busy market.

According to the BBC, up to 7,000 people used the building as a shelter.

A woman told AFP news agency that some children were killed while they were reading the Koran and the building was hit.

“This is the fourth time they have targeted the school without warning,” she said.

According to Hamas, five local journalists were among those killed in Israeli strikes on Saturday. Their families were also reportedly targeted.

According to Reporters Without Borders, more than 100 journalists have lost their lives since the October 7 attacks in Gaza.

According to Hamas, the five most recent victims bring the death toll to 158.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed the hit on the school buildings in a statement and said they had taken “numerous steps” to “reduce the risk of harm to the civilian population, including the use of precise aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”

Hamas fighters were said to be using the site as a “hiding place” for attacks on IDF troops.

“Hamas continues to systematically violate international law by using civilian structures and the civilian population as human shields for its terrorist attacks against the State of Israel,” it said.

Hamas described the attack as a “massacre” of “defenseless displaced civilians.”

Many of the dead and injured were women, children and elderly people, the group claimed via its English-language Telegram channel.

Many schools and other UN facilities were used as emergency shelters by the 1.7 million people who fled their homes during the nearly eight-month war.

“We do not have all the information yet. Since the war began, more than half of our facilities have been hit,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, told the BBC about the latest attack.

“Many of these were emergency shelters, and as a result at least 500 people seeking refuge in these facilities were killed. Many of them were women and children.”

She added that this was not the first time Israel had made such claims and that they needed to be investigated.

Local journalists told the BBC at the time that a fighter jet fired two missiles at classrooms on the top floor of the school.

Following the attack, the Israeli military said it had carried out “a targeted strike on a Hamas compound” at the school, killing many of the 20 to 30 fighters it believed were there.

The UNRWA chief described the incident in June as “horrific” and said the claim that armed groups could have been in a shelter was “shocking” but could not be confirmed.

The Israeli war was triggered by the unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, in which armed fighters led by Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 others hostage to Gaza.

According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, at least 38,098 Palestinians have been killed as a result of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Israel regularly accuses UNRWA of supporting Hamas, which is banned as a terrorist organization in Israel, Britain, the United States and other countries.

The organization has rejected this.

In April, a UN investigation found that Israel had not confirmed claims that many CIA employees belonged to militant groups, but Israel also said it could improve its neutrality, vetting of its employees and transparency.