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The Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip announced on Wednesday that at least 14 people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a school housing displaced people, while the Israeli army said it targeted militants who were there.
“Fourteen martyrs and a large number of wounded were killed in the Israeli bombing of Al-Jaouni School” in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal told AFP.
He had previously reported that “women and children” were among the dead.
In New York, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the killing of six UNRWA employees in the raid.
“What is happening in Gaza is completely unacceptable,” Guterres said via X platform. “A school housing 12,000 people was hit by Israeli airstrikes again today. Six of our UNRWA colleagues were killed. These gross violations of international humanitarian law must stop now.”
Guterres’ position came after UNRWA announced that six of its employees were killed in the raid, in the “highest” human toll the UN agency has ever suffered in a single incident.
The agency confirmed that “this school has been bombed five times since the beginning of the war.”
For his part, a medical source at Al-Awda Hospital told France Presse that the raid resulted in 15 deaths and 44 injuries.
AFP could not independently verify these numbers.
The Hamas government media office said the school, which is run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), was sheltering more than 5,000 displaced people when it was bombed.
For its part, the Israeli army said that its warplanes “carried out a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control center” at the Al-Jaouni School in the central Gaza Strip.
In front of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah (center), a number of people arrived on stretchers after being transported from the site of the strike, according to what a France Presse correspondent reported.
It was clear that some of them had lost consciousness, and among the wounded was at least one child and women.
“There is no safe place in the Gaza Strip,” said Palestinian Umm Ayman. “What did the children, women and elderly do to be torn to pieces?”
Several schools housing displaced people in the Gaza Strip have been hit by Israeli shelling in recent months, with the Jewish state claiming that Hamas militants are hiding there and planning attacks on them, a claim the movement denies.
Since the outbreak of the war on October 7, tens of thousands of displaced people have sought refuge in schools, considering them safer.
The war began after an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,205 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data. That number includes hostages who died while being held captive.
Israel responded to the attack with a bombing campaign and ground assault on Gaza, killing more than 41,000 people in the territory, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The United Nations says most of the dead were women and children.
