(Eyad Baba, AFP)
On June 6, the Israeli army claimed responsibility for an air attack against a United Nations Refugee Agency (UNRWA) school in the Gaza Strip, which killed at least thirty-seven people.
“Our fighter jets hit a Hamas base inside an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat region,” the army said in a statement, adding that “many terrorists were killed.”
“Some of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who participated in the October 7 attack on Israeli territory conducted operations from this base,” he added.
The Hamas press office said at least twenty-seven people died and dozens were injured in the attack on the UNRWA school in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip.
“Many dead and wounded continue to flow to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital,” which is located in Deir al Balah, near Nuseirat, he added, accusing the Israeli army of being responsible for a “horrific massacre.”
Shortly afterwards hospital sources announced a new toll of thirty-seven victims.
According to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), before the attack on the hospital there had already been “at least seventy dead and more than three hundred injured, mostly women and children, following a series of Israeli bombings in the center of the Gaza Strip”.
“This morning in the hospital the smell of blood is unbearable,” Karin Huster, MSF coordinator in the Gaza Strip, declared on the social network “There are people lying everywhere, on the floor and in the courtyard. Bodies in plastic bags continue to arrive.”
In January, UNRWA, which coordinates the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, found itself at the center of a diplomatic storm when Israel accused around ten of its thirteen thousand employees of being involved in the Hamas attack on 7 October.
Many countries, including the United States, had suspended funding to the agency, risking compromising the distribution of aid. Since then, however, many governments have reactivated funding.
On May 31, in an article published in the New York Times, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini asked Israel to “stop its campaign against the agency.”
According to Hamas authorities, the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip has so far caused the deaths of 36,586 people. The Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7 caused at least 1,194 victims in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on the latest available Israeli data.
