Israeli forces targeted another school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza on Thursday, killing 28, including at least five children, and wounding 160.
The strike targeted the Abu Hussein Elementary School in the Jabalia refugee camp, which has been under total siege for about two weeks, a step Israel has taken to carry out an ethnic cleansing plan in northern Gaza.
“There is no water to extinguish the fire. There is nothing. This is a massacre,” Medhat Abbas, a Palestinian health official, told Al Jazeera. “Civilians and children are being killed, burned under fire.”
Israel claimed that it targeted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters who gathered at the school. Israel typically claims schools they target are Hamas “command and control centers.” but never offers evidence to back up the claims.
Hamas denied that it was using the Abu Hussein school, which was run by the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, for military purposes. Hamas called the Israeli claims “nothing but lies,” adding it was “a systematic policy of the enemy to justify its crime.”
Earlier in the day, Gaza’s Health Ministry released its daily death toll, saying at least 29 Palestinians were killed and 93 were injured. The latest violence brings the ministry’s recorded death toll to 42,438 and the number of wounded to 99,246. The figures do not account for the Palestinians who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege.
Other Israeli strikes in Gaza on Thursday included two in northern Gaza that killed 11 people, and several were reported killed by Israeli strikes in the south. Israel said that Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed in the southern city of Rafah.
