Israel says its fighter jets targeted a “Hamas compound” embedded inside a school in Gaza early Thursday, but local health officials say over 30 people were killed in the attack including women and children.
The airstrike hit the al-Sardi School, a facility run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Nuseirat in central Gaza. Both Western and Palestinian news agencies reported that the school was sheltering people who had been displaced by the almost eight-month war at the time of the strike.
The Israel Defense Forces in a statement characterized the bombing as a “precise strike” which eliminated “several Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists” who “participated in the Oct. 7 massacre” in Israel. The military also claimed that “a number of steps were taken to reduce the risk of harming uninvolved civilians during the strike” which involved “conducting aerial surveillance” and “additional intelligence information.”
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According to the Associated Press, victims of the school attack were taken to Deir al-Balah’s already overwhelmed Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The news agency cited one of its reporters at the scene and information from the hospital saying that at least 33 people were killed in the attack, including 14 children and nine women.
The Palestinian Authority’s Wafa news agency reported that 32 died, “most of them women and children,” and dozens more were injured, including some seriously.
Ayman Rashed, a man displaced from Gaza City who was among those seeking refuge at the school at the time of the strike, told the AP that missiles struck classrooms on the second and third floors of the building where families had been sheltering. He said he’d helped to carry five deceased victims out of the school, including two children and an old man. “It was dark, with no electricity, and we struggled to get out the victims,” he said.
The mass casualty incident comes after at least 45 people died in another UNRWA facility for displaced Palestinians in Rafah in southern Gaza last week. The Israeli military said strikes in that incident were also targeting Hamas militants, with an IDF spokesman later claiming that the type of munitions used could not have started the blaze which broke out in the wake of the attack. They added that the inferno which swept through tents, burning people alive and injuring over 200 others, may have instead been ignited by “secondary explosions” due to weapons being stored in the area.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the disaster as a “tragic mistake.” Multiple reports said U.S.-made munitions had been used in the Israeli strike.
Since Israel launched its Gaza offensive in response to the Oct. 7 attacks, over 36,500 people have been killed in the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry.
On Wednesday, before the reported influx of patients from the school airstrike, the ministry shared a press release from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital saying one of the facility’s two electricity generators had failed, risking a “humanitarian catastrophe in which dozens of wounded, sick, and premature babies may fall victim.”
The hospital said it was launching a “distress call to the international community and international organizations” to “save the sick, wounded, and children of Gaza from certain death” by helping to restore the power supply to the hospital “before it is too late.”
