An Israeli air strike hit a school housing a field hospital in central Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 100, said the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory. The Israeli military said its strike targeted Hamas "terrorists" operating from the school.
"A short while ago, the targeting of Khadija school, which had a field medical unit inside it, in Deir al-Balah area, resulted in 30 martyrs and more than 100 wounded," the health ministry said in a statement.
Gaza's civil defence agency said that the school was housing about 4,000 displaced people who had taken refuge there. The field hospital located inside the school belonged to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, according to hospital director Khalil al-Daqran.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the strike was carried out following "precise ... intelligence of terrorists operating in a Hamas compound and control centre inside the Khadija school".
"In parallel, the terrorists developed and stored large quantities of weapons inside the compound," the military said.
The deadly strike came as residents of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis were braced for fresh strikes after the Israeli military on Saturday issued new evacuation orders, asking Palestinians to relocate to a humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi. The recent escalation in hostilities has triggered new waves of internal displacement across Gaza, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, according to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.
Israel’s military ordered the evacuation of a part of a designated humanitarian zone ahead of a planned strike on Khan Younis on Saturday, as the country's negotiators prepare to meet international mediators to discuss a proposed ceasefire.
The evacuation order is in response to rocket fire that Israel said originated from the area. The military said it planned an operation against Hamas militants in the city, including parts of Mawasi, the crowded tent camp in an area where Israel has told thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge throughout the war.
The planned strike comes a day before officials from the US, Egypt, Qatar and Israel are scheduled to meet in Italy and discuss the ongoing hostage and ceasefire negotiations. CIA Director Bill Burns is expected to meet Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani, Mossad director David Barnea and Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel on Sunday, according to officials from the US and Egypt who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to discuss the plans.
It’s the second evacuation order issued in a week that has included striking part of the humanitarian zone, a 60-square-kilometre area blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities and have limited access to aid, United Nations and humanitarian groups say. Israel expanded the zone in May to take in people fleeing Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population at the time had crowded.
According to Israeli estimates, about 1.8 million Palestinians are currently sheltering there after being uprooted multiple times in search of safety during Israel’s punishing air and ground campaign. In November, the military said the area could still be struck and that it was “not a safe zone, but it is a safer place than any other” in Gaza.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said it was increasingly difficult to know how many people would be affected by the evacuation order because those sheltering under there were constantly being displaced.
“Referring to the orders as evacuation orders don’t do any justice to what this means,” said Juliette Touma, the agency's director of communications. “These are forced displacement orders. What happens is when people have these orders, they have very little time to move.”
Further north, Palestinians mourned the deaths of seven killed by Israeli air strikes overnight on Zawaida, in central Gaza. Members of two families – parents and their two children as well as a mother and her two children – were wrapped in traditional Islamic white burial shrouds as community members gathered to perform funeral rites. As men lined up to pray in front of the bodies, weeping friends and neighbours approached individually to pay their final respects.
Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital confirmed the count and Associated Press journalists saw the bodies.
The war in Gaza has killed more than 39, 258 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count. The UN estimated in February that some 17,000 children in the territory are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.
The war began with an assault led by Hamas militants on southern Israel on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. About 115 are still in Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead, according to Israeli authorities.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
