Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeated an unverified Israeli claim about its killing of at least 18 people, including six UN employees, in its strike of a school in Gaza this week — even as he supposedly called on Israel to do more to protect humanitarian sites in its genocide of Palestinians in the region.
On Thursday, Blinken said, “we need to see humanitarian sites protected, and that’s something that we continue to raise with Israel.” He added, without evidence, that Hamas soldiers had been using the al-Jaouni school-turned-shelter that Israel attacked on Wednesday as a command center, and therefore bore responsibility for Israel’s bombs.
This remark, made in a press conference, comes despite Israeli officials providing zero substantial evidence of this claim and Israel’s pattern of using this exact excuse as a guise to continue committing genocide in Gaza.
It also comes as an attack on an UNRWA worker in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas is not active, has forced the organization to suspend operations like schooling in the northern West Bank due to Israel’s invasion there.
Israeli officials have claimed the bombing was a “precise strike” on a “command and control center” within the school, and that nine of the Palestinians it killed, including two UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), were Hamas members.
The UN says that they have no evidence for the claim that the school was being used for Hamas military activities, nor has Israel previously shared any evidence that UN workers it killed were involved in the group. Similar claims by Israel, often made in the wake of particularly horrific massacres that grab media attention, in the past year of its genocide have either not been backed up with evidence or have been debunked by aid groups.
Rather, the accusations may be a cover for the massacre to distract from the horror of the strike, which also injured at least 18 Palestinians; and targeting of UNRWA workers, of whom Israel has killed 220 amid its genocide. Throughout the genocide, U.S. officials have repeatedly echoed Israel’s claims that anything that supports life in Gaza is affiliated with Hamas, and therefore a legitimate target — flying in the face of international law.
Blinken and Israeli forces have neglected to discuss, for instance, the fact that the school is in the area of Gaza that Israel has designated as a “safe zone” — and, additionally, that it was deconflicted, meaning it was specifically marked as a humanitarian site that Israeli forces previously agreed not to attack.
Even further, according to the UNRWA, last week, the school was being used as a polio vaccination site — sites that Israel pledged it would avoid striking during certain times in order to allow the vaccination campaign to be conducted.
“It is outrageous to place the blame on the Palestinians for yet another massacre of civilians, including UN staff, carried out by Israel in a ‘safe zone’, a UN school — all based on unevidenced ‘human shielding’ accusations (i.e Israel’s logic of genocide),” said Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, on Thursday. Albanese was responding to statements made by German officials that, like Blinken’s, echoed Israel’s claims on the attack.
“And with this, we are at 70 percent of UNRWA schools attacked by Israel since October,” Albanese went on. “I can’t believe how far Germany seems ready to go to protect Israel’s genocidal campaign.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an investigation into the strike on al-Jaouni, saying, “this incident must be independently and thoroughly investigated to ensure accountability.”
Adding to Israel’s aggression against the UNRWA and the dubiousness of its claims that it’s only targeting Hamas is the fact that a UNRWA sanitation worker in the occupied West Bank was killed this week amid Israel’s ongoing invasion of the region. This is the first time that Israel has killed a UNRWA worker in the West Bank in over a decade, the agency says. Unlike in Gaza, Hamas does not control governance in the West Bank.
The agency does not specify who killed the worker, Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, but reports that he was killed by a sniper. Israeli snipers are notorious for their killings of Palestinians across the region.
Seemingly because of this killing and other dangers posed by Israel’s assault, the agency says that it “has been forced to suspend services to refugees because of the unacceptable risk to staff and beneficiaries” during Israel’s assault of the northern West Bank. This means that services like UNRWA schooling, which serves 6,000 children in the region, will be suspended, the agency notes.