Israeli strike on Gaza shelter kills at least 30, injures dozens

An Israeli airstrike on a school functioning as a shelter in Gaza City killed at least 30 people and injured dozens more Sunday, according to the Palestinian emergency response agency in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian news outlets. It was the third attack on a school in the past four days.

Most of the victims were women and children, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense. He said that an F-16 fighter jet hit a school called Hassan Salame, where at least 14 people were still buried under the rubble. Shrapnel and debris also hit a neighboring school known as Nasser, he said, though local media outlets said Nasser school was also directly targeted.

The death toll was initially 25, but rose to 30. It was unclear if any of those killed were militants.

The Israeli military said it had targeted “terrorists” in “Hamas command and control centers” located at the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools. It said it had taken “numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians” before the strike, including using precision munitions, surveillance and intelligence, though it did not specify how it had done so.

But civilians paid dearly.

“Right in front of me, there was a 5-year-old child dying. How is that related to Oct. 7?” Basal said. “If you want to kill someone, kill him away from other people.”

Sunday’s attack was a replay of similar scenes Saturday at Hamama School, where Basal said 17 were killed in an attack, and on Thursday at Dalal al-Mughrabi School, where a strike killed 15, he said.

All four schools had housed Gaza residents who were forced to leave their homes during the war, turning classrooms and hallways into squalid temporary shelters. After each strike, videos on social media showed structures on fire, people screaming or running in shock and confusion and others lying motionless on the ground.

Mohsen al-Jabareh, 28, who has been sheltering at Hassan Salame for three months, said he and his family had just sat down to lunch when a deafening blast of smoke, dust and fire enveloped them.

“We felt like we were burning, as if a volcano had erupted over us,” he said, adding that he still could not hear properly hours later.

Though it was hard to tell who was alive and who was dead in the mass of bodies he saw, he said he believed his cousins had been killed. “They are not terrorists, and they’re not killing anyone,” al-Jabareh said. “They’re just civilians without shelter, living in a shelter.”

In its statement Sunday, the Israeli military said Hamas embedded itself among civilians to use them as human shields, a common defense by Israel as it faces global condemnation over the war’s large death toll. International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians even if Hamas exploits them as Israel says it does.

Most of Gaza’s schools have been used as shelters for thousands of displaced people since the war began Oct. 7, when Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel. The Israeli military has repeatedly bombed school buildings in Gaza or struck the areas around them, often asserting that Hamas was using the buildings. The group denies those claims.

A recent assessment by the United Nations found that nearly 85% of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed or damaged during the war, with more than half of the school buildings used as shelters hit directly.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.