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The Hamas-controlled Gaza Civil Defense Agency said on Sunday that the Israeli military launched an attack on a school housing war displaced people, killing 15 people, and the Israeli military said the target of the attack was “terrorists.”
The UN-run Abu Araban shelter in the Nusserat refugee camp in central Gaza was attacked, marking the fifth time in eight days that the school-turned-shelter has been attacked.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Basar told AFP the Abu Araban school housed “thousands of displaced people”, adding that most of the dead were women and children.
Nusserat’s school has been the target of two previous strikes as Israel continues its offensive against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched the war on Oct. 7 with an attack on Israel.
The Israeli military said its air force “strikes several terrorists in the area of the UNRWA Abu Araban school complex in Nusserat”.
The building had been “used as a hideout” and a base for “attacks” on Israeli forces, the report said.
AFP footage showed the three-story building still standing, with clothes and bedding hung on railings. A wall with the UN logo was blown up and rooms inside were damaged.
On July 6, Israeli warplanes attacked Al-Jawni School in Nusserat, also run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). UNRWA said about 2,000 people were taking shelter there at the time.
The next day, four people were killed in an attack on the church-run Holy Family School in Gaza City, in the north of the region, according to the civil defense agency.
On Monday, Israel attacked another school in Nusserat, again claiming it was targeting “terrorists”.
The next day, hospital sources said an attack in front of Al-Awda school in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza killed at least 29 people.
Israel says Hamas is using schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure for military purposes, a charge Hamas denies.
France and Germany called on Wednesday for an investigation into the school strikes.
After the attack in Jawani, UNRWA spokeswoman Juliet Touma told AFP that “we closed the schools and turned them into shelters” when the war started.
She said UNRWA is the main relief agency in Gaza, but more than half of its 190 facilities were hit in the military response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, “some more than once.”
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