More than 100 people were killed and dozens injured early Saturday when the Israeli army bombed a school in Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, which served as a shelter for displaced people by the war, according to the Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian enclave.
“The Israeli occupation army committed a massacre inside the al-Tabain school in Gaza City, which left more than 100 people dead and dozens injured,” Hamas said in a statement.
The attack was carried out “directly on the displaced people while they were performing the dawn prayer” at the school, located in the Al Daraj neighborhood of the Gazan capital, in the north of the Strip, added the Islamist group, which held Israel and the United States, its main partner and arms supplier, responsible for “the crime of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
Israel claims it was a terrorist training center
However, the Israeli military’s international spokesman, Nadav Shoshani, said that Hamas’s figures “do not align with the information obtained by the Israel Defense Forces, the precise munitions used and the precision of the attack.”
“Around 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including senior commanders, were operating from the attacked compound at the al-Tabain school, using it to carry out terrorist attacks,” he wrote on social media.
According to the Army, the bombing was carried out “with precision” after its intelligence services indicated that the school and its mosque served as a “command and control center” for the militia, “from where several attacks against Israeli troops were planned and carried out.”
A military statement said the army took “numerous measures to mitigate the risk of harm to civilians, including the use of precision munitions, aerial surveillance and intelligence information.”
But Ezat al-Rashq, from Hamas’s political bureau, says that among the dead there is “not a single fighter” from the militant group, whose “strict policy is not to be present among civilians.”
“The enemy terrorist army is lying again and fabricating foolish pretexts and arguments to attack civilians,” he stressed.
Broken bodies
Meanwhile, Gaza Civil Defence said firefighters were struggling to extinguish the blaze at the Al-Tabain school, run by international institutions and housing 6,000 people from 350 families displaced by the war, due to a water shortage.
The school mosque, on the upper floor of which only women and children were sheltering, was attacked with US-made missiles that reach extremely high temperatures, causing the fire and burning the bodies, he added.
Images of mangled bodies in the rubble after the bombing of the school were circulating on the networks.
Many civilians are seen collecting corpses with the help of blankets instead of stretchers, while children and women cry desperately amidst the destruction.
Civil Defence has counted 93 bodies, including at least eleven children and six women, but admits that it cannot give a definitive figure due to the state in which the bodies are found, “destroyed and burned”, and they are still scattered in the area.
“There are still large quantities of body parts and dismembered corpses inside Al Ahly Arab Hospital that have not been identified,” he said.
Meanwhile, the injured – many of them in serious condition – mostly have head and chest injuries, first and second degree burns and amputations of limbs, reported the Baptist Hospital, which acknowledged that many of the injured “died on the operating tables due to lack of medical equipment.”
“Massacre”
For its part, the Palestinian militia Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, estimated that “the choice of the dawn prayer time to carry out this horrible massacre confirms that the enemy intended to cause the greatest possible number of deaths among the civilian population, including children and the elderly.”
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health, which governs small parts of the occupied West Bank, called on “the entire international community to put an end to these massacres against civilians and to immediately allow the entry of field hospitals.”
The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry has not updated the death toll since last Thursday, when it reported 39,699 dead and 91,722 wounded, most of them children and women.
Israel kills Gaza police chief in Khan Yunis
The Israeli army said Saturday that its troops killed Walid al-Susi, a Gaza police chief apparently linked to the armed wing of the Islamist group Hamas, during their current ground incursion in the southern city of Khan Yunis, which has caused dozens of deaths.
“Air Force fighter jets attacked last night (…) and eliminated terrorist Walid al-Susi, an activist of the military wing of the Hamas terrorist organization who served as head of department in the Public Security Service, in the south of the Gaza Strip,” said a military statement.
According to the army, Al Susi provided intelligence services and “worked against movements that oppose the terrorist organization Hamas inside Gaza.”
On Friday, ground troops launched a new incursion into the city, with fighting even underground, leaving at least 14 civilians dead – including two journalists – and dozens wounded, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Jerusalem / EFE
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2024-08-13 09:00:16
