At least 15 people have been killed in Israeli air raids on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza, Gaza’s Government Media Office said.
Many others were injured in the attack on the Hamama school in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in Gaza City, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Saturday.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Saturday, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said that at least three bombs were dropped on the school as rescuers and volunteers inside the facility were trying to help people escape from under the rubble.
“Those three bombs destroyed the facility completely. This is the tactic that the Israeli military has widely used in the past. The military drops a bomb that partially destroys facilities, namely evacuation centres, killing a number of people, and then within a few minutes, it drops other bombs,” he said.
The Israeli military said the school was being used as a command centre for Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza, to hide fighters and manufacture weapons.
Hamas has denied Israeli accusations that it operates from civilian facilities such as schools and hospitals.
The group condemned the Israeli attacks on the school and said in a statement that “the occupation army uses lies as a pretext to target defenseless civilians in Gaza.”
In footage verified by Al Jazeera, victims of the Israeli attacks were seen arriving at al-Ahli Hospital.
Among the wounded were children, some of whom appeared to be unconscious, as medical staff desperately tried to treat them.
The scenes at the hospital were chaotic, with some of the wounded lying on the floors as grieving Palestinians lined the corridors.
According to the testimony of one of the wounded, the raids were carried out without warning.
Earlier on Saturday, Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip killed six people in a house in the southern area of Rafah and two others in Gaza City, Gaza health officials said.
The Israeli army said its forces had struck fighters and destroyed Hamas infrastructure in Rafah and elsewhere in the attacks.
In the occupied West Bank, two Israeli attacks killed nine fighters, including a local Hamas commander on Saturday, Hamas said.
A Hamas statement added that one of those killed was a commander of its Tulkarem brigades, while its ally Islamic Jihad said four of the men who died in the raids were its fighters.
The latest attacks came as a high-level Israeli delegation made a brief visit to Cairo on Saturday in an attempt to resume Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Egyptian airport authority sources said.
The delegation returned to Israel hours later, Israeli media said.
Chances of a breakthrough appear low as regional tension has soared following the assassination of Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday, a day after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed Fuad Shukr, a top military commander from Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.
Haniyeh’s death was one in a series of killings of senior Hamas figures as the Gaza war nears its eleventh month, and it fuelled concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.
Hamas and Iran have both accused Israel of carrying out the assassination of Haniyeh and have pledged to retaliate. Israel has neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the death.
