An Israeli airstrike on a UN school filled with hundreds of displaced people in central Gaza has killed more than 20 people, local residents say.
The Israeli military said it carried out an attack on a UN school that housed a “Hamas compound”.
Local journalists told the BBC that an Israeli warplane fired two missiles into classrooms on the top floor of the school in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Hamas’ media office said at least 27 people were killed and accused Israel of committing a “horrible massacre.”
Ambulances and rescue teams took the injured and dead to a nearby hospital.
Images on social media showed destroyed classrooms and corpses wrapped in shrouds in a morgue.
“No more war! We have been displaced dozens of times. They killed our children in their sleep,” shouted a woman injured in the attack in a video.
Ismail al-Thawabta, director of Hamas’s media office, rejected Israel’s claims that the UN school had hidden a Hamas command post.
“The occupation uses… false and fabricated stories to justify the brutal crime it carried out against dozens of displaced people,” he told Reuters.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the jets conducted a “precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded in a UNRWA school in the Nuseirat area.”
The IDF statement said it had “eliminated” the Hamas and Islamic Jihad “terrorists” who took part in the October 7 attack on southern Israel, when around 1,200 people were killed and another 251 were taken hostage.
At least 36,580 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The IDF said it took measures before the airstrike to “reduce the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians.”
Previously, the Israeli military claimed to have taken “operational control” of the eastern areas of the Bureij refugee camp and the city of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, while dozens of Palestinians were reportedly killed.
On Wednesday morning, the military said troops supported by airstrikes began an operation against “terrorists and terrorist infrastructure above and below ground.”
Residents reported intense shelling and the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said at least 70 dead people – mostly women and children – had been taken to a local hospital since Tuesday.
MSF said its medical team on the ground described the situation at Deir al-Balah’s al-Aqsa hospital – one of the only remaining functional healthcare facilities in central Gaza – as “apocalyptic”.
The charity said women and children made up the majority of the 70 dead and 300 injured people taken to hospital over the past 24 hours, and that many patients suffered serious burns, shrapnel wounds, fractures and other traumatic injuries.
“The smell of blood when I walked into the emergency room [this morning] it was just overwhelming. People are lying on the floor. There are people lying outside… bodies being brought in in white plastic bags. The families were close to them and praying,” said Karin Huster, MSF’s lead doctor, in an audio message.
“It’s just an emotionally overwhelming situation. It’s impossible for anyone to deal with this.”
