Palestinian strike after the September 11 strike in the Nuseirat compound of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Gaza: “We have no hope”
The United Nations agency aids Palestinian refugees and the school compound is being used to shelter 6,000 people.
“Claims that armed groups may have been inside the shelter are shocking. We are however unable to verify these claims,” he said in a statement on the social media platform X.
The courtyard and school staircase were covered in blood after the strike. Two boys with head and leg injuries remained in the school compound. Children were fetching wood from among the rubble to use as firewood, and the U.N. officials were trying to repair a door and windows of the compound for families still sheltered there.
The number and identities of those killed in the strike, in the central Gaza neighborhood of Nuseirat, remained unclear. Gazan health officials have given death tolls ranging from 41 to 46. Yasser Khattab, an official overseeing the morgue at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al Balah — where many of those killed were taken — said 18 were children and nine were women.
The emergency room at Al-Aqsa Hospital is worse than it was yesterday. A medical adviser for Doctors Without Borders says that they don’t have a chance to regroup after yesterday’s events and are now struck with mass casualties. “Patients are on the floor. There is blood everywhere … dead bodies are not being taken to the morgue because the facility is overwhelmed.”
The Nuseirat facility: a U.N. school housing displaced civilians after a big strike by the U.S. military
The official said Israel was using the most advanced bombs the U.S. produced.
The Israeli military claimed that it hit Hamas as well as other Iranian-backed armed group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who were hiding in the complex. To back up that account, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief Israeli military spokesman, late Thursday listed the names of nine militants he said had been killed in the attack and said the Israeli authorities would soon verify the identities of more.
There are families in the school. NPR documented one body bag that was labeled as containing the remains of five children.
Wes Bryant, the former Air Force official, said the U.S. military would have most likely called off such a strike where militants were holed up in a U.N. school housing displaced civilians because the estimated number of civilian casualties would be high.
What strikes me most about the most recent strikes by the IDF. [Israeli military], in which large numbers of civilians have again been killed, is that they are using munitions intended to be both precision and low collateral damage — but they are not employing them in a manner in which those qualities are applied,” said Bryant, a retired master sergeant and former special operations joint terminal attack controller in the elite special warfare branch of the U.S. Air Force.
The Israeli military declined NPR’s request for comment on the kind of munitions used, but identified the names of nine men it said were militants killed in the strike.
The U.N. school in Nuseirat is sheltering families that had been displaced multiple times: those who fled north Gaza to Rafah in south Gaza at the start of the war, and who then fled Israel’s offensive on Rafah to the U.N. school.
He said that as soon as the word of a big strike got to the facility, a designated official prepared to receive the ambulances and register the dead and wounded. “We look for any marker that would help us identify the person,” said Mr. Khattab, adding that officials often had to collect multiple body parts from an individual, placing them into a single bag.
Israeli forces pushed ahead with their offensive in Gaza on Friday, a day after a strike on a school complex-turned-shelter
The Israeli military pushed ahead with its offensive in central Gaza on Friday, a day after a strike on a United Nations school complex-turned-shelter killed dozens, including women and children, according to Gazan health officials.
The military claimed that it had targeted 20 to 30% of the group using three classrooms as a base. The toll of civilians has grabbed the attention of international critics.
The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had killed dozens of extremists and destroyed several tunnels in other parts of central Gaza.
“We’re seeing that Hamas still exists, and they still have capabilities above and beneath ground,” Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters on Thursday, describing ongoing attacks by “smaller cells” of militants using rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and booby traps.
On Thursday, Hamas militants emerged from a tunnel near Rafah, just a few hundred feet from Israeli territory, in an attempt to launch an attack inside the country, the Israeli military said. Israeli drone and tank fire aimed at the militants killed three, according to the military, and an Israeli soldier was also killed in the firefight.
The Al Aqsa hospital has a system to record mass casualty events, despite the severe challenges of the war, said the Al Aqsa hospital’s morgue official.