CHARLOTTE, N.C (TNS) — Many people are feared to have died when a United Nations school in Gaza was hit on Saturday, in the latest tragedy to strike during the six-week-long war between Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement.
A spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, reported many deaths and injuries at the school in Jabalia and accused the Israeli army of being responsible.
The head of the U.N. Palestinian relief agency UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, wrote on the social platform X that he had received horrific images and videos of dozens of people killed and injured at the school.
“These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer,” he wrote.
According to Lazzarini, thousands of internally displaced people had sought refuge in the building.
It is not yet confirmed which side was responsible for the attack on the school. Israel’s military said it was checking the reports.
Reaction in the region has been fierce.
Egypt condemned what it called the “terrible bomb attack by Israeli occupation forces.” The Foreign Ministry said that it was “a new blatant violation against the Palestinian people.”
The Jordanian Foreign Ministry also strongly condemned the attack, and what it said were Israel’s “heinous and ongoing war crimes.” The strike on a school was a “blatant violation of international law,” Amman said.
Israel’s massive air bombardment of Gaza began after Hamas terrorists rampaged through communities in southern Israel near the Gaza border, killing some 1,200 people, and taking about 240 people hostage.
Israel’s air and ground offensive, with the stated aim of eliminating Hamas and Islamic Jihad, has killed over 11,500 people, according to the Hamas-run authorities.
Since the war started, Israel has often accused Hamas of using schools and hospitals as command centers or weapons stores.
The Israeli military said on Saturday it was expanding its evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s al-Shifa hospital, at the request of the hospital director. Soldiers have been searching the facility and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the hospital was the site of a Hamas command center.
Some of the Gaza residents who had sought sanctuary in the grounds of the territory’s largest hospital wished to leave and would be offered safe passage, the Israel Defense Forces said. Eyewitnesses confirmed that people were leaving the hospital grounds.
Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila — from the Palestinian Authority which is in charge of Palestinian affairs in the West Bank — called on Israel to transfer patients “left behind” at al-Shifa hospital to other hospitals in Egypt or the West Bank.
There are still 32 premature babies and 126 injured people in the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, she said at a press conference in Ramallah.
There were five doctors still in the hospital, she said. According to the minister, all other people were forced to leave the hospital within an hour on Saturday morning.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Saturday that a team had led a “very high risk U.N. assessment mission” to al-Shifa.
“The team saw a hospital no longer able to function: no water, no food, no electricity, no fuel, medical supplies depleted,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“We are working with partners to develop an urgent evacuation plan and ask for full facilitation of this plan,” he wrote.
One of the problems facing hospitals and other public facilities across Gaza is the lack of fuel, but some deliveries did begin on Saturday.
Three trucks loaded with some 129,000 liters (34,000 gallons) of diesel entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing.
UNRWA chief Lazzarini said that “following long weeks of delay, the Israeli authorities approved only half of the daily minimum requirements of fuel for humanitarian operations in Gaza.”
Israel approved the import of diesel into the Gaza Strip for humanitarian purposes on Friday. Netanyahu told reporters on Saturday that such humanitarian gestures were “essential” to maintain international support for Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas.
The head of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, made a direct call to President Joe Biden on Saturday to call for an end to the fighting.
“What our people are enduring in terms of killing and destruction surpasses human capacity. What is America waiting for in the face of the ongoing genocide against our people in Gaza?” he said in a televised address.
A grab from an AFPTV video shows an Israeli armored vehicle rolling past Palestinians fleeing Gaza City on foot amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group on Nov. 18, 2023. (Belal Al Sabbagh/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
