In a new attack this Saturday, the Israeli military targeted a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City, killing over 100 Palestinians and injuring dozens more.
The Israeli forces carried out new bloody airstrikes near Gaza City this Saturday, targeting a school full of displaced Palestinians. The airstrikes killed more than 100 people and injured dozens more.
“About 100 martyrs and dozens were injured as a result of Israeli bombing of a school for displaced people in the Al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City,” the Gaza Civil Defense said in a statement issued a few hours after the attack, adding also that “the occupation forces targeted displaced persons with missiles while they were performing the dawn prayer at Al-Tabiin School.”
Ismail al-Thawabta, the head of Gaza’s Government Media Office, said that the Israeli army used “three bombs weighing 2,000 pounds (907kg) each” in its attack. “Israel was aware of the presence of displaced people inside the school, but it conducted the attack anyway,” he also noted.
Speaking of the gravity of the school’s situation after Israel’s deadly strikes, the head of emergency services in northern Gaza Marwan Sultan told Al Jazeera that “no matter how much I talk about this crime, it cannot be described.”
“Upon arriving at the scene, we saw the bodies and remains on top of each other. Men, women, and children. The bodies were in pieces and burned,” he said, demanding that the world and the international community “take action to stop these massacres against our people, the Palestinian people.”
“Some of the bodies were hard to recognize, so relatives at the hospital searching for their loved ones are struggling to find any way to identify them”, Sultan added.
Israel justified the attack, the world condemns it!
The Israeli military issued a statement following the deadly attack and acknowledged that it used precision munitions but claimed that the killings were justified because there were members of Hamas among the population, accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
This, however, is not a new story in the war between Israel and Hamas. Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked schools used as shelters in Gaza, claiming they are command centers for Hamas. Israeli forces have killed at least 39,700 Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war back in October last year.
Less than a day after the deadly airstrikes, several countries across the world openly condemned Israel careless killing of Palestinians. Qatar and Egypt were also among the countries that rebuked Israel’s airstrikes, two of the key mediators leading negotiations for a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Palestinian political factions, as well as NGOs and the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) also denounced the strike.
Israel ordered more evacuations after the deadly attack!
Following the deadly strike, the Israeli military ordered more evacuations in southern Gaza early Sunday. Israel has repeatedly ordered mass evacuations as its troops have returned to heavily destroyed areas where they had previously battled Palestinian militants.
Most of Gaza’s population, which is above 2.3 million, have been displaced due to the Gaza war, often for several times.
Hundreds of thousands have crammed into squalid tent camps with few public services or sought shelter in schools like the one demolished on Saturday. According to Palestinians, nowhere in the Gaza’s besieged Strip is safe.
