By An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza has resulted in at least 15 deaths, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The incident occurred on Thursday at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp where Israel has been conducting intensive air and ground operations for over a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s local emergency unit, confirmed the death toll and reported that dozens more were wounded. He emphasized that the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to cope with the influx of casualties, noting that “Many women and children are in critical condition.”
The Israeli military claimed the strike targeted a gathering of dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants at the school. They provided a list of approximately a dozen names of individuals they identified as militants present at the time of the strike. However, independent verification of these names was not immediately possible.
This incident is part of a pattern of Israeli strikes on tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. While the Israeli military maintains that it conducts precise strikes on militant targets and attempts to avoid civilian casualties, its operations frequently result in the deaths of women and children.
The current conflict was triggered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants launched an attack into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Approximately 100 captives are still believed to be in Gaza, with a third presumed dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has led to over 42,000 Palestinian deaths, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but reports that slightly more than half of the fatalities are women and children.
In a separate development, a building in central Beirut housing offices of Al Jazeera news network and the Norwegian Embassy was evacuated following a warning. The source of the warning was not specified. This incident occurs amid a context where Israel has ordered evacuations of several buildings and entire areas in Lebanon, targeting what it claims are Hezbollah-linked sites.
