A Gaza hospital said at least 37 people were killed in an Israeli strike yesterday on a UN-run school that the Israeli military alleged housed a “Hamas compound.”
The raid came after US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators resumed talks aimed at securing a truce and hostage-prisoner swap in the nearly eight-month war triggered by Hamas’ attack on Israel Oct. 7 last year.
The Israeli military said it had “eliminated” several militants in a “precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside an UNRWA [UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] school” just before 2am in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza.
Photo: AFP
Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in Gaza of using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure including facilities run by UNRWA — charges the militants deny.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, near Nuseirat, said it had received the bodies of at least “37 martyrs” from the strike.
An AFP photographer saw Palestinians removing blood-stained mattresses and examining damage to the school where displaced Gazans had been sheltering, parts of it littered with broken concrete slabs.
Hamas in a statement decried a “new crime... against our people,” urging international pressure on Israel to stop “these brutal massacres.”
A medic at the hospital said another Israeli predawn strike killed six people in a house in Nuseirat refugee camp, while witnesses reported intense shelling in the Bureij and al-Maghazi camps in the same area.
Israeli warplanes also carried out strikes in parts of Rafah, a source in Gaza’s southernmost city said.
The Israeli military said troops killed three suspects who had tried to breach the Gaza border fence in the Rafah area, adding no militants had crossed into Israel.
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