An Israeli strike early Thursday on a school housing displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health authorities. But a UN official told the Reuters news agency that the UN could not yet confirm any death toll.
The Israeli military said Hamas militants were operating from the school.
The strike came after the army announced a new ground and air assault on several refugee camps in central Gaza, pursuing Hamas militants it says have regrouped there.
It is the latest case of troops returning to sections of the Gaza Strip they had previously invaded, underscoring the militant group's resilience despite Israel's nearly eight-month assault on the territory.
Witnesses and hospital officials said the pre-dawn strike hit al-Sardi school, run by the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. The school was full of Palestinians who had fled Israeli offensives and shelling in northern Gaza, they said.
Reuters TV / REUTERS
Ayman Rashed, a displaced man from Gaza City who was taking refuge in the school, said the missiles hit classrooms on the second and third floors where families were sheltering. He said he helped bring in five dead, including an old man and two children, one with his head split open. “It was dark, without electricity, and we struggled to get the victims out,” Rashed said.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah received at least 33 deaths from the strike, including 14 children and nine women, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter in the hospital. Another attack on a house overnight killed six people, according to records. Both attacks took place in Nuseirat, one of several refugee camps built in Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes. in what became the new state.
Mohammed al-Kareem, a displaced Palestinian shelter near the hospital, described chaotic scenes outside the facility. He said vehicles arrived one after the other as distressed people rushed the injured to emergency services. Videos circulating online appeared to show several injured people being treated on the hospital floor, a common scene in Gaza's overflowing medical wards.
Images showed bodies wrapped in blankets or plastic bags lined up in the hospital courtyard, which was largely dark as staff tried to conserve limited fuel for electricity. Al-Kareem said he saw people searching for their loved ones among the bodies, and that one woman kept asking medical workers to open the bodies' wrappings to see if her child was inside.
“The situation is tragic,” he said.
The Israeli military said Hamas had planted a “compound” in the school and that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants inside were using it as a hideout where they planned attacks on Israeli troops, although it did not provide evidence immediately. He circulated a photo of the school, pointing to classrooms on the second and third floors where he claimed there were militants.
It said it took steps ahead of the strike “to reduce the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians … including conducting aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
UNRWA schools in Gaza have functioned as a shelter since the start of the war, which has driven most of the territory's 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes.
Israel launched its own campaign in Gaza after Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Israel's offensive has killed at least 36,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Hamas Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its figures.
Israel blames the civilian deaths on Hamas because it positions fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in residential areas.
The United States has thrown its weight behind a gradual ceasefire and hostage release President Biden explained last week. But Israel says it will not end the war without destroying Hamas, while the militant group is calling for a lasting ceasefire and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces.
The army said on Wednesday that forces were operating “both above and below ground” in the eastern parts of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. He said the operation began with airstrikes on the militants' infrastructure, after which troops launched a “targeted daylight operation” in both areas.
Doctors Without Borders said at least 70 bodies and 300 wounded, mostly women and children, were taken to a hospital in central Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday after a wave of Israeli attacks.
The international charity said in a post on X on Wednesday that Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is struggling to treat “a huge influx of patients, many of them arriving with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, fractures and other injuries traumatic”.
Gaza's health system has nearly collapsed during nearly eight months of war. The hospital, which was treating about 700 injured and sick people before the latest strikes, said on Wednesday that one of its two power generators had stopped working, threatening its ability to keep ventilators and incubators for premature babies running.
Israel has routinely launched airstrikes in all parts of Gaza since the start of the war and has carried out massive ground operations in the territory's two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Younis, which left much of them in ruins.
The army launched an offensive earlier this year for several weeks in Bureij and several other refugee camps near central Gaza.
Troops withdrew last Friday from the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction. First responders have recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, killed during the battles.
Israel sent troops in Rafah in May in what it said was a limited incursion, but those forces are now operating in central parts of southernmost Gaza City. More than 1 million people have fled Rafah since the start of the operation, with many heading for central Gaza.
