Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza kills at least 27 people

Those killed in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah included a child and seven women, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where the bodies were taken. It said several other people were wounded.

The Israeli military said it carried out a precise strike targeting a militant command and control centre inside the school, without providing evidence.

But witnesses said the strike occurred while school managers were meeting representatives of an aid group in a room normally used by Hamas-run police who provide security.

They said there were no police in the room at the time.

The Palestinian branch of Terre des Hommes, a Swiss aid group, said members of one of its children’s health teams were killed in the strike, though it did not specify how many.

“There were no militants. There was no Hamas,” said Iftikhar Hamouda, who had fled from northern Gaza earlier in the war.

“We headed to tents. They bombed the tents. In the streets, they bombed us. In the markets, they bombed us. In the schools, they bombed us. Where should we go?”

The Hamas-run government operated a civilian police force numbering in the tens of thousands, but they largely vanished from the streets after the start of the war as Israel targeted them with air strikes. Plainclothes Hamas security personnel still exert control over most areas.

The militant group has continued to launch attacks on Israeli forces and fire occasional rockets into Israel more than a year after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 2023 which ignited the war.

The militants stormed into Israel in that attack, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. They are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were fighters but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities.

The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced around 90% of its population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times.

In a separate development, the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon said an Israeli tank fired on its headquarters in the town of Naqoura, hitting an observation tower and wounding two peacekeepers.

The attack drew widespread condemnation and prompted the Italian Defence Ministry to summon Israel’s ambassador in protest. The Israeli military said it was looking into the incident.

The peacekeeping mission known as Unifil said in a statement that its headquarters and nearby positions “have been repeatedly hit”.

It said the Israeli army also fired on a nearby bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, damaging vehicles and a communication system. It said an Israeli drone was seen flying to the bunker’s entrance.

The reports came as the Israeli military continued to pound Hezbollah targets in Lebanon while the militant group kept up its rocket attacks, setting off air raid sirens in parts of northern Israel.

The Lebanese Health Ministry said an Israeli air strike on Thursday killed at least four people and wounded 17 in Karak, a village in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Unifil, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The United Nations expanded its mission following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, condemned Israel’s strikes on Unifil as “an inadmissible act, for which there is no justification”.

“Another line has been dangerously crossed in Lebanon,” he wrote on social media.

In Italy, which has about 1,000 soldiers deployed as part of Unifil, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said her government had formally protested to Israeli authorities. She added that she had received updates from the Italian contingent and praised the peacekeepers for their “valuable work”.

Jordan’s Foreign Ministry also denounced the Israeli strikes on the peacekeepers as a “dangerous escalation” and “flagrant violation of international law”.

Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure along the border in violation of the UN Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war. It has warned people to evacuate from dozens of communities in southern Lebanon, many of which are outside the buffer zone.

The UN peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said last week that the peacekeepers were staying in their positions on Lebanon’s southern border despite Israel’s request to vacate some areas before it launched its ground operation against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on October 8 2023 in support of Hamas and the Palestinians, drawing Israeli air strikes in retaliation.

The fighting steadily escalated, and eventually boiled over into all-out war in recent weeks, with Israel carrying out waves of heavy strikes across Lebanon and launching the ground invasion.

Hezbollah has expanded its rocket fire to more populated areas deeper inside Israel, causing few casualties but disrupting daily life.

Israel says the ground invasion, which has so far focused on a narrow strip along the border, is aimed at pushing the militants back so that tens of thousands of Israelis can return to their homes in the north. The fighting has displaced more than a million people in Lebanon.