US says Israel must remain open to Gaza school strikes

A school in central Gaza was reportedly packed with displaced people on Thursday morning as the United States launched airstrikes on Israel that killed at least 35 people and told Israel to be completely “transparent”.

Local journalists told the BBC that a warplane fired two missiles at a classroom on the top floor of a school in the refugee camp in the city of Nuserat.

The Israeli military said it carried out a “precision” strike against a “Hamas compound” inside the school, but Gaza’s Hamas-run government media office denied the claim.

The United States has called on Israel to reveal the identities of Hamas militants it says it killed, just as the Israeli military released the names of nine of them.

Israel regularly identifies militants targeted by its airstrikes, but the United States rarely urges it to do so.

The Israelis “told us they were targeting 20 to 30 militants” [and] “They will release the names of the militants they believe they have killed,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

“That’s what they said they would provide. We hope they can provide that, as well as any other details that can shed light on this incident.

At an almost simultaneous press conference, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari revealed the names of nine Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters who he said were killed in the attack. The Israeli military later said it had confirmed that eight more members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the attack, bringing the total number of deaths to 17.

Miller said in Washington that the United States had received reports that 14 children had been killed in the strikes.

“If the news that 14 children were killed is true, then they are not terrorists,” he said.

“As a result, the Israeli government has indicated that they will release more information about this attack… We expect them to be fully transparent in releasing this information.”

Just a week ago, an Israeli attack on the Gaza city of Rafah killed 45 people.

The latest strike took place in the early hours of Thursday at Saadi School, in the densely populated southeastern part of the decades-old refugee camp, local journalists and residents said, according to the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. Activities are carried out right there.

Videos shared on social media showed several classrooms in a building at the school destroyed and bodies wrapped in white shrouds and blankets.

The dead and wounded were rushed to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah, which has been overwhelmed since the Israeli military launched a new ground operation against Hamas in central Gaza this week.

The BBC is working to verify details of the strike at the Nuserat camp. Reports vary on the exact death toll.

The Hamas Health Ministry in Gaza said that 40 people had died, including 14 children and 9 women, and 74 others had been injured.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said at least 35 people were killed and many injured. Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, told the BBC that the figures came from UNRWA’s “colleagues on the ground”.

Witnesses described scenes of destruction following the attack.

“I was sleeping when the incident happened,” Udai Abu Elias, a man who lives at the school, told BBC Arabic.

“Suddenly we heard a huge explosion and shattered glass and pieces of the building fell on us. The air was filled with smoke and I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t expect to make it out alive. I heard someone calling for survival. When I tripped over the corpse of the martyr, I struggled to crawl out from under the rubble.

UNRWA said 6,000 displaced people were sheltering in school buildings at the time. During the nearly eight-month war, many schools and other UN facilities were used as shelters by the 1.7 million people who fled their homes.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attack through a spokesman, saying U.N. premises must be “inviolable” and protected by “all parties” during the conflict.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that warplanes “carried out precision strikes on a Hamas compound inside the school.” An annotated aerial photo highlights classrooms on the building’s upper two floors, which the Israel Defense Forces described as “the location of terrorists.”

U.S. officials continue to lobby for what President Joe Biden calls an Israeli cease-fire proposal.

The three-part plan begins with a six-week ceasefire that will see Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza’s densely populated areas. There will also be a “surge” in humanitarian aid and the exchange of some hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

The agreement will ultimately lead to a permanent “cessation of hostilities” and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza. Germany, France and Britain reiterated their support for the deal in a joint statement with the United States on Thursday and called for “a lasting end to the crisis”.

CIA Director William Burns met with Egyptian and Qatari mediators in Doha on Thursday to discuss the plans, but senior Cairo officials told Reuters there were no signs of a breakthrough on the deal.

At least 36,470 people have been killed in Gaza during nearly eight months of fighting, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Hamas killed approximately 1,200 people and took 251 hostages during an attack on southern Israel on 7 October.

Additional reporting was by Rushdi Abu Alouf in Istanbul and David Gritten in London.