37 people have been killed after Israel attacked a UN-run school which the Israeli military said housed a “Hamas compound” in Gaza.
A hospital in central Gaza confirmed the number of casualties on Thursday.
The overnight deadly strike came as United States, Qatari, and Egyptian mediators have resumed talks aimed at securing a truce and hostage release deal in the nearly eight-month war triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The military said it had “eliminated” several militants in a “precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside a UNRWA school in the area of Nuseirat”, in the central Gaza Strip.
Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in Gaza of using schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure including facilities run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, as operational centres – charges the militants deny.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, near Nuseirat, said it had received the bodies of at least “37 martyrs” from the strike, updating an initial death toll of 27 provided by the Hamas government media office which condemned it as a “horrific massacre that shames humanity”.
Israeli strikes kill over 100 in Gaza
Israel accuses Hamas of using schools and other civilian infrastructure as operational centres, charges the militants deny.
Palestinians were seen removing blood-stained mattresses and inspecting the damage to the school where displaced Gazans were sheltering, parts of it now littered with broken concrete slabs.
A medic at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said another Israeli pre-dawn strike killed six people in a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, while witnesses reported intense artillery shelling in Bureij and Al-Maghazi camps in the same area.
Israeli warplanes also carried out strikes in eastern and central neighbourhoods of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, a local source told AFP.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians.
Militants also took 251 hostages, 120 of whom remain in Gaza, including 41 the army says are dead.
Israel’s ensuing bombardment and ground offensive have killed at least 36,586 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
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