An Israeli airstrike hit a school that had been converted into a shelter in Gaza City early Saturday, killing at least 80 people, Palestinian health authorities said, in one of the deadliest attacks in the 10-month war between Israel and Hamas.
The Israeli military acknowledged the attack on the Tabeen school in central Gaza City, claiming it hit a Hamas command center inside the school. Hamas denied this.
There are reports of increasing Israeli attacks on schools in Gaza, which have become shelters for people forced to flee their homes by the war.
Video footage from the scene showed blown-out walls on the ground floor of a large building. Blocks of concrete and twisted metal lay on the blood-soaked floor, along with clothing, overturned furniture and other debris. A charred car with blown-out windows was covered in debris.
Fadel Naeem, director of al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, told The Associated Press that the facility received 70 bodies of those killed in the attack and the body parts of at least 10 others. The Health Ministry said another 47 people were wounded.
According to Naeem, some of the injured suffered severe burns and many had limbs amputated.
“We have suffered some of the most serious injuries we have ever experienced in the war,” he said.
According to Abu Anas, a witness who helped rescue people, the strike happened unexpectedly in the early morning, just before sunrise, while people were praying in a mosque inside the school.
“There were people praying, there were people washing, there were people sleeping upstairs, including children, women and old people,” he said. “The rocket fell on them without warning. The first rocket, and the second. We recovered them as body parts.”
Three rockets hit the school and the mosque inside, where about 6,000 displaced people were seeking shelter because of the war, said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the Civil Defense emergency services under the Hamas local government.
Many of the dead were unrecognizable, he said, adding that he expected the death toll to rise. Many of the victims were women and children, he said.
In a report released on Monday, the UN Human Rights Office said there had been at least 17 attacks on schools in the past month — seven of them in the past eight days alone — reportedly killing 163 people, many of them women and children. Many of the schools were serving as shelters, the report said, adding that Israel has a duty under international law to provide safe shelter to the displaced.
“There is no justification for these massacres,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement on social media platform X, referring to the school strikes.
According to the UN, as of July 6, 477 of the 564 schools in Gaza had been directly affected or damaged by the war.
On Thursday, the Israeli army attacked two schools housing displaced people in eastern Gaza City, killing at least 15 people, hospital officials said.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian deaths in Gaza, saying the group endangers civilians by using schools and residential areas as bases for operations and attacks.
Israeli intelligence indicated that about 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including senior commanders, used the Tabeen school grounds to plan attacks on Israeli troops, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli army spokesman, said in a statement on X.
Izzat al-Rishq, a senior Hamas official, denied that there were any militants in the school.
Shoshani also had doubts about the casualty figures announced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
According to Israel, the school targeted in the attack was next to a mosque that served as a shelter for residents of Gaza City.
However, a cameraman working for The Associated Press said the mosque and classrooms were in one building, with the prayer hall on the ground floor and the school above. A rocket appeared to have passed through the classroom floor into the mosque below and then exploded, the cameraman said.
The strike came as American, Qatari and Egyptian mediators increased their pressure on the two sides to reach a ceasefire agreement which increased tensions in the region after the assassination of Hamas’ top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.
Egypt, which borders Gaza and serves as a key mediator, said the attack on the school showed that Israel had no intention of reaching a ceasefire and ending the war. Neighboring Jordan condemned the attack as a “flagrant violation” of international law. Qatar demanded an international investigation, calling it a “heinous crime” against civilians.
Two separate airstrikes in central Gaza on Friday evening killed at least 13 people, including three children and seven women, hospital officials said. An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah.
One strike hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing seven people, all but one of whom were women, hospital officials said. Another strike hit a house in Deir al-Balah, killing six people, including a woman and her three children, the hospital said.
According to the Israeli campaign in Gaza, more than 39,790 Palestinians have been killed and more than 92,000 others injured. the Ministry of Healthin the Hamas-run area, which makes no distinction between fighters and civilians in its count. The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which Gaza-based militants swept into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others.
More than 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents before the war have been forced from their homes, repeatedly fleeing across the territory to escape attacksMost of them are now packed into dilapidated tent camps in an area of about 50 square kilometers (19 square miles) on Gaza’s coast.
