Israeli strike on Gaza U.N. school Israel says was being used by Hamas said to have killed more than 30

An Israeli attack Thursday morning on a school housing displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said Hamas militants were operating inside the school.

The attack came after the military announced a new ground and air attack on several refugee camps in central Gaza, pursuing Hamas militants who it said had regrouped there.

It is the latest case of troops returning to areas of the Gaza Strip that they had previously invaded, underlining the resilience of the militant group despite Israel’s nearly eight-month attack on the territory.

Witnesses and hospital staff said the pre-dawn attack hit the al-Sardi School, run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known by its acronym UNRWA. The school was full of Palestinians who fled Israeli offensives and bombings in northern Gaza, they said.

Ayman Rashed, a displaced man from Gaza City who was sheltering at the school, said the missiles hit classrooms on the second and third floors where families were sheltering. He said he helped carry five dead people, including an old man and two children, one of whom had her head split open. “It was dark, there was no electricity, and we struggled to get the victims out,” Rashed said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah received at least 33 dead in the attack, including 14 children and nine women, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter at the hospital. Another attack on a home overnight killed six people, records show. Both attacks took place in Nuseirat, one of several refugee camps built in Gaza dating back to the 1948 war that surrounded the creation of Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what became the new state.

Mohammed al-Kareem, a displaced Palestinian sheltering near the hospital, described chaotic scenes outside the facility. He said vehicles arrived one after another as distressed people rushed the injured to the emergency department. Videos circulating online appeared to show several injured people being treated on the hospital floor, a common scene in Gaza’s overcrowded medical wards.

The images showed bodies wrapped in blankets or plastic bags laid out in rows in the hospital courtyard, which was practically dark as staff tried to conserve limited fuel for electricity. Al-Kareem said he saw people searching for their loved ones among the bodies and that one woman asked health workers to open the bandages on the bodies to see if her son was inside.

“The situation is tragic,” he said.

The Israeli military said that Hamas had built a “compound” inside the school and that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants inside were using it as a shelter where they planned attacks on Israeli troops, although they did not immediately offer evidence. He released a photo of the school, pointing to classrooms on the second and third floors, where he claimed the militants were located.

It said it took steps before the attack “to reduce the risk of harming uninvolved civilians… including conducting aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”

UNRWA schools in Gaza have functioned as shelters since the start of the war, which drove most of the territory’s 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes.

Israel launched its campaign in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, in which militants killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostages. Israel’s offensive has killed at least 36,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its numbers.

Israel blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it positions fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in residential areas.

The United States threw its full weight behind a phased ceasefire and the release of hostages outlined by President Biden last week. But Israel says it will not end the war without destroying Hamas, while the militant group demands a lasting ceasefire and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces.

The military said on Wednesday that forces were operating “above and below ground” in the eastern parts of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. He said the operation began with airstrikes on militant infrastructure, after which troops began a “targeted daytime operation” in both areas.

Doctors Without Borders said at least 70 bodies and 300 injured people, mostly women and children, were taken to a hospital in central Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday following a wave of Israeli attacks.

The international charity said Wednesday in a post on traumatic.”

Gaza’s healthcare system nearly collapsed during nearly eight months of war. The hospital, which was treating about 700 wounded and sick people before the latest attacks, said on Wednesday that one of its two electrical generators had stopped working, threatening its ability to continue operating ventilators and incubators for premature babies.

Israel has routinely launched airstrikes in all parts of Gaza since the start of the war and has carried out massive ground operations in the territory’s two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Younis, which have left many of them in ruins.

The military waged an offensive earlier this year for several weeks on Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza.

Troops withdrew from the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction. First responders recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, killed during the fighting.

Israel sent troops in Rafah in May in what he said was a limited incursion, but those forces are now operating in central parts of Gaza’s southernmost city. More than a million people have fled Rafah since the start of the operation, many of them towards central Gaza.