Israeli airstrike on school kills 26 displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah

Israel conducted an airstrike on Thursday on displaced people taking shelter in Rofayda school in the crowded city of Deir al-Balah on Thursday. Twenty-six Palestinians were confirmed killed, and over 90 others were injured, according to Mada Masr’s correspondent in the area.

Thousands of people were taking shelter in the school building before it was targeted, the Gaza Government Media Office said in a statement on Thursday afternoon. 

“Where should people go?” said Eftekhar Hamouda, a displaced woman taking refuge in the targeted school who spoke to Mada Masr on Thursday. “They attacked us in our houses, in tents, in the streets and in schools, where are people supposed to go?”

Deir al-Balah is sheltering nearly a million Palestinians displaced from their homes across the strip, according to the government office.

The Occupation heightened its aerial campaigns on other areas of the strip on Saturday, particularly in the northern part, where over 170,000 people have been displaced over recent days as Israeli soldiers bombarded the area. Israeli officials have reportedly considered plans to empty the north of the strip of its citizens and isolate Palestinians into the southern part of the strip. 

Footage of Rofayda school following the airstrikes showed hundreds of displaced people searching alongside civil defense in the rubble for the body parts of many people still missing after the strike. When asked how many people were killed in the strike, one of the men searching said they were still looking for bodies. Others showed signs of severe distress in the wake of the explosion. 

The bottom floor of the school, which is at least three stories high, appeared to have been targeted directly. The ceiling of the bottom floor could be seen completely collapsed and most of the outer walls of the first floor were destroyed.

Hamouda said that the school was sheltering many people, including women, and that there were sites to provide services to pregnant women and to supply vaccinations in the same site.

Ambulances transferred the dead and injured to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where medics rushed to provide treatment, according to a Mada Masr correspondent in the area. The hospital department was crowded and many of those injured — some of whom were in critical condition — were being provided treatment on the floor. Several of those wounded were young children who had suffered shrapnel injuries.

The government media office stated that the hospital “is unable to properly offer health and medical care for the great number of the displaced given the massive overcrowding and numerous casualties arriving around the clock.” 

From its side, the Israeli military made its habitual claim that it carried out a “precise strike on terrorists,” who it said had a command and control center in the school. 

Israel has been targeting schools and refuge centers since it launched its offensive on the Gaza strip last October, claiming each time that Hamas uses these buildings as command centers, killing dozens of civilians. Since Israel launched its offensive on the besieged enclave last year, 42,065 have been killed and 97,886 injured, while thousands others are trapped under the rubble, with ambulances and civil defense teams prevented from reaching them.  

While Hamas denied the Israeli allegations in a statement on Thursday, the Gaza Media Office stated that the Israeli military knew that the school was harboring “thousands of children and women” which it  displaced from their homes and bombed their civilian neighborhoods.” 

The targeting of Rofayda school raised the number of shelter and displacement centers where the Israeli army launched airstrikes to 190, the office said. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of civilians in northern Gaza, mainly Jabalia and its neighboring areas, have received orders earlier this week to evacuate southward. 

In parallel with its new ground offensive on the north, the Israeli military also ordered residents of areas in central Gaza to evacuate. The residents were living at the southern threshold of the Nestarim corridor — an area of land the military has occupied in the center of the strip for months, and which it uses to police movement between the north and south of the Gaza Strip.

Residents and eyewitnesses of the northern strip, many of whom wish to stay in their homes, told Mada Masr over the past week that even those who are willing or able to leave the north are being prevented from leaving by constant Israeli fire at the street level and on the roads out of Gaza City.

Many of those ordered to evacuate arrived at Deir al-Balah on Saturday. Yet refuge centers in the area — a school and a mosque — were the target of heavy Israeli bombing in the early hours of Sunday morning, killing dozens and wounding more.