At least 16 people died in an Israeli aerial strike on a school in the Gaza Strip. The strike left several others injured.
The building was sheltering thousands of displaced people at Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry as quoted by BBC.
In its X post, the Israel Defense Forces said: “Based on IDF and ISA intelligence, the IAF struck several terrorists operating in structures located in the area of @UNRWA ’s Al-Jaouni School in central Gaza.”
The force further said: “This location served as both a hideout and operational infrastructure from which attacks against IDF troops operating in Gaza were directed and carried out.”
IDF said: “Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken in order to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
The IDF said Hamas group continues to systematically violate international law by exploiting civilian structures and the civilian population as human shields for its terrorist attacks against the State of Israel.
An estimated 85,000 people have left Shujaiyah district in eastern Gaza City in the north of the enclave in the last week, UNRWA noted, while latest data indicates that by Tuesday, at least 66,700 more Gazans had been displaced from eastern Khan Younis and Rafah, both in the south, following new evacuation orders issued on Monday evening.
The Gaza Strip is virtually “split in two”, with blockades not only restricting the movement of displaced people seeking shelter, but also aid workers trying to assist civilians in desperate need, a UN relief official said on Wednesday.
Speaking via video link from Jerusalem, Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), said people have been forced to “completely reset their lives over and over again”.
“People, in the last nine months, have been moved around like ‘pawns in a board game’ – forced from one location to the next, to the next [and] to the next, irrespective of our ability of support them and irrespective of the availability of services wherever they land,” he said.
