More than 100 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike on a Gaza school sheltering displaced people, the official Palestinian news agency said on Saturday, while the Israeli army said it had hit a Hamas command centre.
“The Israeli strikes targeted the displaced people while performing Fajr (dawn) prayers, a matter led to a rapid increase in the number of casualties,” the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said in a statement.
In its statement, the Israeli army said its air forces “struck command and control centre served as a hideout for Hamas terrorists and commanders.”
Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp Channels.
“The IAF precisely struck Hamas terrorists operating within a Hamas command and control center embedded in the Al-Taba’een school and located adjacent to a mosque in Daraj Tuffah, which serves as a shelter for the residents of Gaza City.”
“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and intelligence information,” it added.
On August 3, an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in the occupied West Bank killed a Hamas commander, Hamas media reported, while Palestinian news agency WAFA said four other people were also killed.
The identities of the others were not clear, WAFA said.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 the military says are dead.
In response, Israel has carried out a military offensive that has killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.
The war has uprooted 90 per cent of Gaza’s population, left almost 500,000 people enduring “catastrophic” hunger and shuttered most hospitals, UN agencies said.