The Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday that at least 27 people were killed in an Israeli attack near a UN school in a refugee camp in Jabaliya.
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“The bodies of 27 martyrs have been recovered and there are also many injured,” said ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidreh. This assessment could not immediately be verified.
In images from AFPTV we see numerous blood-covered bodies lying on the ground in front of the school, where many displaced people from the ongoing war had sought refuge.
“Children under the age of ten were torn to pieces,” screams a lady in the schoolyard, while others tearfully hug each other for comfort.
There was no immediate comment from UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, which runs the school.
The Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest in the Gaza Strip, was the target of deadly bomb attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday. According to the Hamas government, 195 people died in these attacks, a number that could not be verified.
15 km south of Jabaliya, in the Boureij refugee camp, another Israeli bombardment destroyed about twenty houses and killed at least 15 people, according to the Gaza Civil Defense.
“In just five minutes after the civil defense team arrived, fifteen martyrs were rescued from the rubble,” the rescue service said in a statement to the press.
“The planes bombed the entire building. I was pulled out of the rubble myself,” camp resident Hanane Abdelhadi said in an AFPTV video.
Another resident, Mohamad Karajah, holds his two-year-old son, who was injured in the face. “The house collapsed on top of us, more than 20 houses were in ruins,” says the 27-year-old.
According to Hamas’ health ministry, 9,061 people, including 3,760 children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war with Israel, which was sparked by Hamas’s bloody attack on Israeli soil on October 7. That attack killed around 1,400 people, mostly civilians, the deadliest since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.