Thousands were sheltering in Al-Jawni school at the time of the attack, the government press office said [Getty]
The government in Gaza said an Israeli strike on a UN-run school where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering killed 16 people on Saturday.
The territory’s health ministry, which condemned the strike as an “odious massacre”, said 50 injured were taken to hospital from Al-Jawni school in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip.
Some 7,000 people were sheltering in the school at the time of the attack, the government press office said. Dozens of people scrambled through the rubble after the strike to find survivors.
The press office said the school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and most of the casualties were “children, women, and elderly”.
The Israeli military claimed it “struck several terrorists operating in structures located in the area of UNRWA’s Al-Jawni school”. Israel often makes such claims with no evidence.
Earlier, UNRWA said two of its workers were killed in a strike at Al-Bureij, also in central Gaza. The agency has a major food warehouse in the district.
Paramedics said 10 people, including three journalists, died in a strike on a house in Nuseirat.
“Absolutely no place in the Gaza Strip is safe,” said civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal.
The war began was sparked when the Palestinian Hamas group led an attack in southern Israel on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures. Fighters also seized over 250 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.
Hamas says the attack came in response to decades of Israeli occupation and continued aggression against Palestinians, including attacks on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, deadly raids in the occupied West Bank, and the blockade of Gaza.
Israel has since carried out a blistering military offensive in Gaza that has killed over 38,000 people, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry. Thousands more are presumed dead, buried beneath the rubble, and much of the enclave has been reduced to rubble.