Author: Nidal Mugrabi and Ramadan Abed
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – Israel attacked a school housing displaced Palestinian families in central Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 16 people, the Palestinian health ministry said, killing at least 16 people in an attack it said targeted militants.
The attack on a school in Nuserat left at least 16 people dead and more than 50 injured, the health ministry said.
The Israeli military said it took precautions to minimize risks to civilians before targeting gunmen who used the area as a hideout to plan and carry out attacks against soldiers. Hamas denies that its fighters are there.
Ayman al-Atouneh said at the scene that he saw children among the dead. “We ran out here and looked at the target area and we saw the bodies of children, debris, it was a playground, there was a trampoline here, there were swings, there were vendors,” he said.
Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civilian emergency services, said in a statement that the death toll was likely to rise as many of the injured were in critical condition.
He said the attack meant no place in the enclave was safe for families leaving their homes to seek asylum.
Nuserat is one of eight historic refugee camps in the Gaza Strip where Israel intensified its bombing on Saturday. An earlier airstrike on a house in the camp killed at least 10 people and injured many others, according to medics.
Israel’s military strikes on the enclave killed at least 29 Palestinians and wounded 100 others in the past 24 hours, Gaza’s health ministry said in a daily update on the number of people killed in the nearly nine-month-old war. .
Five local journalists were among those killed in multiple airstrikes on Saturday, bringing the number of journalists killed since Oct. 7 to 158, according to the media office of the Hamas-led Gaza government.
Health authorities in Gaza say more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive. The health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, but officials said most of the dead were civilians.
Israel lost 323 soldiers in Gaza and said at least a third of the Palestinian dead were fighters.
On October 7, a Hamas-led attack on Israel killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 people hostage, according to Israeli statistics, in an Israeli offensive aimed at wiping out the radical Islamist group Hamas.
Operation Rafah
Israeli forces on Saturday carried out an incursion deep into the southern enclave of Rafah near the Egyptian border, carrying out airstrikes on their vehicles that killed four Palestinian police officers and wounded eight others, health officials said.
A statement from the Hamas-controlled interior ministry said the four included Fares Abdel-Al, the head of the police force in the western community of Tel Sultan Rafah.
The Israeli military said its troops continued “Operation Intelligence Base” in Rafah, destroying some underground buildings, seizing weapons and equipment and killing several Palestinian gunmen.
Israel says its operation in Rafah is aimed at eliminating the last remaining armed forces of Hamas.
The Israeli military said it destroyed a Hamas rocket cell operating within a designated humanitarian area in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. It said the precision strikes were carried out after measures were taken to ensure civilians were not harmed.
Armed factions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said the militants attacked Israeli forces in several areas of Gaza with anti-tank rockets and mortars.
