At least 28 killed in Israeli attack on school sheltering displaced in Gaza

An Israeli air strike on a school-turned-shelter in the central Gaza Strip has killed at least 28 people and wounded dozens of others, according to Palestinian authorities.

Following the Israeli occupation army’s targeting of Rafida School, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, “Palestine Red Crescent teams responded to 28 fatalities and 54 injuries on Thursday.” The death toll was also confirmed by Gaza’s health ministry.

28 martyrs and more than 54 injuries were transported to the hospitals in the Deir el-Balah area of the central governorate this afternoon, according to the ministry. “The Israeli occupation committed a new massacre by targeting the displaced in the]Rafida] school,” the ministry said.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said children and women “were torn to pieces by the intensity of the strike”.

According to Abu Azzoum, “I saw a lot of bodies that were torn to pieces, making it quite difficult to identify them until family members managed to identify them from some signs in their clothing in the hospital morgue.”

He claimed that the Israeli army didn’t issue a warning before striking the building.

The Israeli army claimed in a statement that the attack targeted Hamas fighters operating from a alleged command-and-control facility “embedded inside a building that previously housed the]Rafida School.”

It did not provide evidence, but claimed the building was used “to plan and execute terrorist attacks against]Israeli army] troops and the State of Israel”.

The latest Israeli attack on a school building in Gaza, where fighting has raged for more than a year, came on Thursday.

Children and women are most frequently killed in the attacks. UNRWA’s organization for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) runs a number of schools, many of which have been damaged or destroyed.

On September 26, at least 15 people were killed in another school-turned-shelter strike in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, according to Gaza’s civil defence.

In the ravaged region, which has previously experienced numerous ground and aerial attacks, the Israeli military launched a new ground assault on Jabalia, where thousands of families have been stranded inside their homes.

The Israeli army is “inspecting the houses” in the camp, according to Abu Azzoum, and is making arrests of men who are 14 and older.

He claimed that they are “driving them to undisclosed locations across the Gaza Strip.”