By Erika Solomon and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
Israel said it struck a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Saturday because it believed Hamas militants were using the building as a command center.
Palestinian health authorities said the attack killed 22 people, mostly women and children, who had sought shelter at the school, and did not confirm any combatant deaths.
Israel has conducted dozens of airstrikes on schools across the Gaza Strip, structures that thousands of Gazans have sought shelter in as they are displaced by fighting across the embattled enclave.
The Israeli army said the compound was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has repeatedly made in justifying its increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.
Gaza’s rescue services said the Saturday strike on the Zeitoun School killed mostly women and children, including a 3-month-old infant.
Gaza’s health ministry, which usually does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its counts, also said 22 were killed, saying “the majority” of the dead were women and children.
In a statement on Saturday, the Israeli military said it conducted “a precise strike on terrorists” operating at the Al Falah School, which according to statements from the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, is connected with the Zeitoun School.
The military did not say whether the strike had killed any Hamas militants, as such statements often do.
Since the 11-month war in Gaza began, schools in the territory have been closed and have instead housed those fleeing the fighting.
More than 90 percent of Gaza’s nearly 2 million residents have been displaced in the war — many of them several times.
This is not the first time the school complex has been hit. UNRWA condemned a previous strike on the complex in November.
Although schools have become regular targets of Israeli strikes, they continue to draw Palestinians seeking shelter because they offer some limited access to plumbing and are seen as somewhat safer than other places in the enclave, which has suffered increasing lawlessness.
The media office for the Gazan government, which is controlled by Hamas, said that many widows and orphaned children had been at the school to receive a small payment to help cover food costs. Hunger is a pervasive problem in Gaza, with experts warning this summer that almost half a million people in the territory faced starvation.
(Cullled from New York Times / vitalnewsngr.com)
