Israel airstrike Thursday on a UN school where hundreds of displaced people have taken refuge. Local officials say at least 27 people were killed in the attack on the school in central Gaza.
The Israeli army says the UN school it attacked turned out to be a “Hamas compound”.
Local journalists told the BBC that two missiles were fired from an Israeli warplane into an upstairs classroom at the school in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Hamas’s media office accused the Israeli attack of “reckless murder”.
Videos circulating on social media showed rows of bodies lying in front of destroyed classrooms and morgues.
“There have been many wars! We have been evicted countless times. They killed my children while they were sleeping,” a woman injured in the attack screamed in a video.
Ismail al-Thawbata, director of the Hamas media office, denied Israel’s claim that the school was occupied by Hamas.
“The occupiers use these fabricated stories to justify the brutal crimes they have committed against countless displaced people,” he told Reuters.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that its warplanes carried out a “targeted attack on a Hamas compound behind a UN school in the Nuseirat area.”
The statement said they killed Hamas and Islamic Jihad “terrorists” who took part in the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.
At least 36,580 people have died in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health.
The IDF says it took sufficient precautions before the airstrikes, “so that innocent civilians are not harmed.”
Earlier, the Israeli military said it had taken “operational control” over the eastern Burez refugee camp and Deir al-Balah city in central Gaza, where scores of Palestinians were reported killed.
Residents there reported intense shelling and the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said at least 70 bodies – mostly women and children – had been brought to a local hospital since Tuesday.
MSF said its medical team described the situation at Deir al-Balah al-Aqsa hospital, the only functioning health care facility in central Gaza, as “unimaginable”.