The Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Palestinian movement Hamas, said Saturday morning that at least 90 people were killed in an overnight Israeli strike on a school in Gaza City. The school was serving as a shelter for about 250 displaced people, the majority of them women and children, according to media sources in the Hamas government, which rules the Gaza Strip.
During a press conference at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal reported several shots: “The airstrikes targeted two floors of the Al-Tabi’een Quranic school and the mosque [adjacente] with three missiles, causing the death of 93 people including eleven children and six women.”
For its part, the Israeli army indicated in a statement published on the social network X that “according to Israeli intelligence, about twenty Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including high-ranking commanders, were operating from the compound hit at the Al-Tabi’een school.” The same source also specified that the figures put forward by the Palestinian movement “do not correspond to the information held” by Israeli forces.
Key information to remember
⇒ Hamas denounces “dangerous escalation” after strike on Gaza school
⇒ Iran open to “any agreement” [de trêve] accepted by Hamas” in Gaza
⇒ US activist shot and wounded during West Bank protest
Hamas denounces ‘dangerous escalation’ after strike
Following the strike, the Islamist Hamas movement in power in the Gaza Strip on Saturday denounced “a dangerous escalation” in the war being waged by the Israeli army in the Palestinian territory.
According to Reuters news agency, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry also condemned the strike, saying that “the killing of Gaza civilians showed that Israel had no intention of ending the war,” while Qatar called for an “urgent international investigation.”
The UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Italy’s Francesca Albanese, accused Israel of “genocide” of the Palestinians on Saturday. “Israel is committing genocide of the Palestinians, one neighborhood at a time, one hospital at a time, one school at a time, one refugee camp at a time, one security zone at a time,” Albanese said on the social network X.
The strike on the Al-Tabi’een school, the toll of which cannot be independently verified, is one of the deadliest since the start of the war in Gaza, based on data provided by the Palestinian Islamist movement.
Iran open to ‘any agreement’ [de trêve] accepted by Hamas”
The day before, Israel agreed to resume talks on a truce in the Gaza Strip, after a pressing appeal from mediating countries in the face of the risk of military escalation in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would send “on August 15 a delegation of negotiators to a location to be agreed to conclude the details of a concrete agreement.”
On Thursday, the three mediating countries, Qatar, the United States and Egypt, called for the resumption on August 15 of indirect talks with a view to a truce, indicating that a framework agreement was “now on the table, and that only the details of its implementation were missing.”
“Any agreement accepted by Hamas will also be recognized by us,” the Iranian mission to the UN said on Saturday, affirming however that a ceasefire in Gaza has “nothing to do” with the response promised by Tehran to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.
West Bank: American activist injured during protest
An American activist told AFP that he was shot and wounded by the Israeli army on Friday during a protest against settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank town of Beita. “There was a protest and we were there to film to make sure we had eyes on the occupation army [israélienne]and at one point we ran away and they shot me in the leg,” said the man, who asked from his hospital bed to be identified by his pseudonym Amado Sisson.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said in a statement that its teams were treating a foreign activist who was hit by a live bullet during a demonstration, without specifying his identity. Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army said that the soldiers had “used means to disperse riots and fired live bullets in the air to disperse” a “gathering” in the Beita region.
No US sanctions after death of Palestinian-American
The US State Department said Friday it will not sanction an Israeli military unit involved in the killing of a Palestinian-American, arguing that Israel had already taken the necessary steps. Omar Assad, 78, who spent much of his life in Milwaukee, was killed in January 2022 in the West Bank after being left lying face down for more than an hour, handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded, outside on a winter night.
The spotlight had been on the Netzah Yehuda troops, a unit formed in 1999 and largely comprised of ultra-Orthodox soldiers. “We have concluded that the necessary steps have been taken to address the violations committed by this unit,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said. “This unit can continue to benefit from U.S. security support,” he added.