By Rushdi Aboualouf and Tom McArthur, BBC News
At least 16 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said.
Dozens more were injured in the attack on the building housing thousands of displaced people in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Video from the scene shows adults and children screaming in a smoky street covered in dust and rubble as they run to help the injured.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it struck several “terrorists operating in structures located in the area of the Al-Jaouni school.”
Eyewitnesses told the BBC that the attack targeted the upper floors of the school, which is located near a busy market.
The BBC estimates that up to 7,000 people used the building as a shelter.
A woman told AFP news agency how children were killed while reading the Koran when the building was hit.
“This is the fourth time they have targeted the school without warning,” she said.
According to a local source, the target was a room allegedly used by Hamas police. The BBC was unable to verify this claim.
In a report posted on X – formerly known as Twitter – the Israeli military confirmed it had struck the school buildings, saying it had taken “numerous measures” to “mitigate the risk of harm to civilians, including the use of precise aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
Hamas militants used the location as a “hideout” to carry out attacks against IDF troops, he added.
“Hamas continues to systematically violate international law by exploiting civilian structures and the civilian population as human shields for its terrorist attacks against the State of Israel,” he added.
Hamas called the attack a “massacre” of “defenseless displaced civilians.”
Many of the dead and injured were women, children and elderly people, the group said via its English-language Telegram channel.
ReutersMany schools and other United Nations facilities were used as shelters by the 1.7 million people who fled their homes during the war, which lasted nearly eight months.
A previous attack in June on another crowded UN-run school in Nuseirat killed at least 35 people.
Local journalists told the BBC at the time that a warplane had fired two missiles at classrooms on the top floor of the school.
After the attack, the Israeli military said it had “carried out a precise strike on a Hamas compound” in the school and killed several of the 20 to 30 fighters it believed were inside.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which runs the school, called the June incident “horrific” and said the claim that armed groups may have been inside a shelter was “shocking” but could not be confirmed.
Israel’s war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took 251 others to Gaza as hostages.
At least 38,098 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli offensive, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
