An Israeli airstrike on a UN school filled with hundreds of displaced people in central Gaza has killed at least 27 people, according to local officials.
Local journalists told the BBC that an Israeli military plane fired two missiles at classrooms on the top floor of the Nuseirat refugee camp school.
The Israeli army said it “conducted a precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside” the school.
Hamas’ media office accused Israel of committing a “horrible massacre.”
Ambulances and rescue teams transported the injured and dead to a nearby hospital.
Images posted on social media showed destroyed classrooms and bodies wrapped in shrouds in a morgue.
“Enough of the war! We have been displaced dozens of times. They killed our children while they were sleeping,” a woman injured in the attack shouted in a video.
Ismail al-Thawabta, director of Hamas’ media office, rejected Israel’s claims that the UN school hid a Hamas command post.
“The occupation is using… false, fabricated stories to justify the brutal crimes it has committed against dozens of displaced people,” he told the Reuters news agency.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said aircraft carried out a “precise strike on a Hamas compound inside an Unrwa school in the Nuseirat area.”
He said he killed Hamas and Islamic Jihad “terrorists” who took part in the October 7 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.
Since then, at least 36,580 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The Israeli military said it took steps before the airstrike to “reduce the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians.”
Earlier, the Israeli military said it had taken “operational control” of eastern areas of the Bureij refugee camp and the town of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, amid reports that dozens of Palestinians were killed .
Residents reported intense shelling and the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) group said at least 70 bodies – mostly women and children – had been taken to a local hospital since Tuesday.
MSF said its medical team on the ground described the situation at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah – one of the last functioning health facilities in central Gaza – as “apocalyptic”.
