The targeted school has been used these past few months as a shelter for displaced Palestinian families. Regardless, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claims the attack targeted a secret Hamas "command and control center" in the school.
Israel has faced criticisms for repeatedly striking civilian centers like schools and hospitals that provide refuge and aid for Palestinians and then claiming that they are Hamas centers, almost always without presenting evidence for its claims regarding Hamas activity in these facilities.
The bombing of the school brought the number of people killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip within 24 hours to 36. Footage from the Hafsa al-Faluja School showed rescue workers rushing casualties out of the shelter amid widespread debris and crowds of other Palestinians rushing in to aid their neighbors. One video even showed men wrapping a mangled, severed torso in a plastic sheet and putting other body parts into a cooler.
Israel keeps bombing schools in Gaza and then claiming that these schools are being used by Hamas as command centers. Israel has used this claim to target schools operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, leading to over 200 UN aid workers being killed by Israel since the beginning of the conflict.
At least 61 percent of schools in Gaza have been directly hit by Israeli fire since October, and another 24 percent have been less heavily damaged. Within the span of just a few days, Israeli strikes targeted at least five schools throughout Gaza.
Many school buildings in Gaza have been repurposed to shelter displaced families across the Strip, where around 90 percent of its 2.3 million residents have repeatedly been displaced. The conflict has so far resulted in over 41,000 deaths, the majority of which are women and children, and injured nearly 100,000 others. At least 1,300 of the deaths are infants.
In a statement on Telegram, Hamas condemned the attack and described it as a broader campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people being carried out by Israeli forces in Gaza.
In a similar incident, a school in Gaza City was bombed on Sept. 21, killing at least 22 people, including 13 children, six women and a three-month-old baby, as reported by the Gaza Media Office. (Related: IDF murders at least 22 CIVILIANS in recent bombing of school sheltering displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza.)
In another recent incident, five Palestinians, including two children and one woman, were killed when the IDF bombed a customs police area east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Another two Palestinians were killed by Israeli artillery fire in the Al-Zahour neighborhood of Rafah. In central Gaza, three people were killed following an Israeli airstrike on a home in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Watch this clip showing the massive destruction in the southern Gazan city of Deir al-Balah.
This video is from the AllTheWorldsAStage channel on Brighteon.com.
"Twice witness to Nakba:" Gaza grandmother's story of survival and death in 1948 and 2024.
Palestinian health ministry shares names of nearly 1,000 health workers killed by IDF in Gaza.
Sources include: