Gaza’s Civil Defense announced on Wednesday that 14 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school converted into a shelter for Palestinians displaced by the war, with the Israeli military saying it targeted Hamas “terrorists”.
“There are 14 martyrs and several wounded following the massacre at the Al-Jouni school in the Nusseirat refugee camp” in the central Gaza Strip, Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal told AFP.
He had earlier said that “women and children” were among the dead.
AFP is not able to independently verify this assessment.
The Israeli army said in a statement that its aircraft had “carried out a precision strike on terrorists operating inside a Hamas command center” in the Al-Jouni school.
The Hamas government’s media office in the Gaza Strip said the school, which is run by the UN refugee agency (UNRWA), was housing around 5,000 displaced people at the time of the strike.
In recent months, the army has struck several schools in the Gaza Strip, accusing them of housing Hamas command centers, something the Palestinian Islamist movement denies.
Tens of thousands of displaced people have sought shelter in schools since the war in Gaza began after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel.
The war was triggered on October 7 by a Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.
Of the 251 people abducted that day, 97 are still being held in Gaza, 33 of whom have been declared dead by the army.
The Israeli reprisals have left at least 41,084 dead, according to a report from the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza. The majority of the dead are women and children, according to the UN.