Middle East Crisis: At Least 25 Reported Killed in Israeli Airstrike in Southern Gaza
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An Israeli airstrike near a school building being used as a shelter by displaced Palestinians killed at least 25 people and injured more than 50 on Tuesday outside of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, the Gaza Ministry of Health said. Many of the injured were in critical condition, and the death toll was expected to rise, it added.
The strike hit the entrance of Al Awda School in the town of Abassan, on the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis, according to the health ministry. The Israeli military said that the strike was targeting a Hamas member who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, and that it was “looking into reports that civilians were harmed.”
The strike was condemned by Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, who asked in a post on social media, “For how long are innocent civilians going to bear the brunt of this conflict? We condemn any violation of international law: those responsible must be held accountable.”
Tuesday’s strike was at least the fourth in four days in which the Israeli military bombed school buildings or struck in their immediate vicinity. In each instance, the military said the buildings were being used by Hamas or other militant groups.
At least 16 people were killed on Saturday in an Israeli strike at a school operated by UNRWA, the main United Nations agency that assists Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, according to the health ministry. The following morning, Israeli forces bombarded a Catholic school in Gaza City where hundreds of civilians were sheltering, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which runs the facility. And on Monday, the Israeli military said it had carried out a strike on militants who had been “using the structures of a school in the area of Nuseirat as cover.”
Relatives of Palestinian victims next to their bodies at a morgue at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday.Haitham Imad/EPA, via ShutterstockA Palestinian man carrying an injured child to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday.Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA man in bloodstained clothes outside Nasser hospital.Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
According to the United Nations, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools have been severely damaged or destroyed by fighting, including all of the enclave’s 12 universities. Many of them had been converted into makeshift shelters for people displaced during the war.
Last month, an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza killed dozens of people at a U.N. school complex that thousands of displaced Palestinians were using as a shelter. Palestinian officials said the strike killed civilians, including many women and children.
Israel also struck schools that were being used as shelters in May, killing more than a dozen people, and last November, killing at least 24. In each case, Israel said it had been targeting Hamas fighters.
Images of the strike on Tuesday were posted online by Palestine TV, a network affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas based in the West Bank, and by Agence France-Presse, an international news agency.
The photos published by Agence France-Presse and Reuters showed the bodies of gravely injured Palestinians sprawled on the floor of a hospital emergency room and piled onto the back of a pickup truck and a dirty cart pulled by a motorcycle.
Injured Palestinians arriving at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday.Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In others, a woman and a child can be seen grieving next to body bags lying on the blood-streaked hospital floor. In another, a man cradles the bloody body of a child.
Palestine TV showed footage of panicked men and women ferrying the injured to an emergency room. Some rushed there in a battered ambulance, others in a sedan packed with children, its windows shattered and cracked. In one video, a man runs through the crowd to the hospital entrance shouting for mercy from God. In his arms is the body of a child, limp and flailing. The New York Times could not independently verify the videos.
In a statement, Hamas condemned the strike as “a continuation of the genocidal war and massacres by the Zionist terrorist government against our people.”
The group, which led the Oct. 7 attacks, in which hundreds of civilians in Israel were killed and abducted, said the strike on Tuesday showed Israel’s disregard for “the laws and treaties designed to protect civilians in war.”
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.