Israel-Hamas War and Gaza News: Latest Updates
An Israeli airstrike early Saturday hit a school compound in northern Gaza where displaced Palestinians were sheltering, killing dozens of people, according to Gazan officials.
The strike in Gaza City, the latest in a string of attacks on schools turned into shelters, drew strong condemnation from the European Union and the United Nations, with Josep Borrell Fontelles, the top E.U. diplomat, saying that “there’s no justification for these massacres.”
The White House, too, issued a statement about the strike, with a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, Sean Savett, saying that the Biden administration was “deeply concerned” about reports of civilian casualties and “asking for further details” from Israel.
The series of Israeli strikes has taken place alongside mounting international pressure on Israel to conclude a deal for a cease-fire and exchange hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian detainees. President Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar said this week in a joint statement that “the time has come.”
Mr. Savett on Saturday emphasized that call. “We mourn every Palestinian civilian lost in this conflict, including children, and far too many civilians continue to be killed and wounded,” he said. “This underscores the urgency of a cease-fire and hostage deal, which we continue to work tirelessly to achieve.”
The Gaza Civil Defense emergency service said more than 90 were killed in Saturday’s airstrike, but that number could not be confirmed, and two doctors at one hospital in the area gave slightly lower totals. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
The Israeli military on Saturday evening said it had used three munitions and killed at least 19 Islamic Jihad and Hamas fighters. It did not provide an overall death toll for the strike, and asserted that Israeli bombs “cannot cause the amount of damage that is being reported.”
The military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Saturday in a video statement that “according to our intelligence, no women and children were present” in the building hit by the airstrike. Regarding the casualty count, he said, “These figures do not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, and they do not match the information” of the Israeli military.
The Civil Defense emergency service said the strike hit as more than 200 people had gathered before sunrise in a prayer hall to worship. More than 2,000 displaced people had been staying at the shelter, the Al-Tabaeen school in the Al-Daraj neighborhood, Civil Defense said.
The Israeli military says that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields and uses school buildings as centers of operations — while international law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians. At least 17 school buildings in Gaza have been targeted in the past month, with at least 163 Palestinians killed in the attacks, the U.N. human rights office said in a report this week.
The Civil Defense spokesman, Mahmoud Basal, said 11 children and six women were among the dead in Saturday’s attack, adding that many people were seriously wounded.
The airstrike hit two floors, one of which was used for communal prayers and the other for sheltering women and children, Mr. Basal said. He said the prayer hall inside the school complex has been used for worship since the beginning of the 10-month war.
People grieved following an Israeli strike on a school turned shelter on Saturday.Credit…Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Many of those wounded in the Israeli strike, including children, were arriving with severe burns covering much of their bodies, said Tayseer al-Tanna, a surgeon at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, who called the scene “very difficult to watch.”
Fadel Naim, a medical official at Al-Ahli Hospital who served for years as dean of the medical college at the Islamic University of Gaza, widely seen as a Hamas stronghold, said the hospital had received at least 70 bodies since Saturday morning. The strike was followed by a flood of people searching for loved ones missing in the wake of the explosion, he said.
Khamis Elessi, a doctor at the same hospital, in Gaza City, said more than 73 identified bodies were brought to the hospital morgue, as were another 10 who have yet to be identified because they were disfigured in the explosion.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are believed to be broadly reliable, though there is often uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of specific strikes, and the destruction of the territory’s health system has made tolls harder to track.
Israeli forces have recently been scaling up military attacks throughout Gaza in areas where they had previously fought Hamas, saying the fighters had regrouped.
People checking the damage after a Saturday strike on a school turned shelter.Credit…Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Troops had previously moved in on the Al-Daraj neighborhood in early July as part of a renewed ground offensive in Gaza City. But the Israeli military appears to have wound down its ground operation there, even as it continued to conduct airstrikes in the area.
Many of its offensives in recent days have targeted school grounds — a large number of which have been converted into makeshift shelters. The U.N. has said that strikes were escalating and that it was “horrified by the unfolding pattern.”
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called the deadly attack “another day of horror” in Gaza. He called on all sides not to harm civilians or use schools for military purposes.
“It’s time for these horrors unfolding under our watch to end,” he said on social media. “We cannot let the unbearable become a new norm.”
The U.N. and other rights organizations have repeatedly said that there is no safe place in Gaza as areas people are ordered to evacuate to are subsequently targeted by Israeli airstrikes. Almost the entire population of Gaza — more than two million Palestinians — has been displaced multiple times.
Ameera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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