A new IDF attack in the Gaza Strip, targeting a UNRWA school in the Nuseirat refugee camp. The provisional toll is 37 victims, including several children. According to the local correspondent of Al Jazeera, a broadcaster banned from operating in Israel, there were displaced families inside.
The Israeli forces instead speak of a Hamas compound, inside which there were militiamen involved in the October 7 attack. The IDF says that “before the attack, a series of measures were adopted to reduce the risk of harming uninvolved civilians, including aerial surveillance and additional intelligence information.”
Local journalists told the BBC that a warplane fired two missiles at classrooms on the top floor of the building. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al Balah said it had received the bodies of 37 people killed in the raid. Hamas accused Israel of committing a “horrific massacre”. It is the latest massacre among Palestinians trying to find refuge as Israel expands its offensives in the Strip.
Among the victims were 9 women and 14 children, the Associated Press reports, citing health officials. Witnesses said the school was full of Palestinians who had fled Israeli offensives and bombings in the northern Strip.
Ayman Rashed, a displaced person from Gaza City who was in the school, said that the missiles hit the classrooms on the second and third floors where the families were taking refuge. He said he helped carry five dead people out of the facility, including an old man and two children, one with a broken head. “It was dark, without electricity, and we struggled to get the victims out,” the man said. According to some sources, in another raid launched against a house during the night the IDF killed six people.
“Children, like all children in the world, are the first victims – comments the vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land, Father Ibrahim Faltas, interviewed by Radio24 – of these atrocities. Thousands have lost their lives, thousands are still under the rubble, thousands have suffered serious amputations and thousands will carry the physical and moral signs of war with them.” “Who will erase the psychological traumas of children, of all children, without distinction of nationality and religious belief?”, asks the Franciscan.
Irina Smirnova
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