Israeli forces killed at least 30 people and injured over 100 in an attack on a girls’ school in central Gaza on Saturday, potentially using what one expert said is a U.S. bomb.
The strike on the Khadija School, near Deir al-Balah, killed at least 15 children, officials reported. Their bodies were sent to al-Aqsa Hospital nearby, along with people who were injured in the attack. The Associated Press reported seeing a dead toddler loaded into an ambulance after the attack.
The aftermath of the attack was chaos, as those who sheltered at the school scrambled to save injured children and searched the rubble, which was “strewn with pillows and other signs of habitation,” The Associated Press wrote. Al-Aqsa, like the other medical facilities in Gaza, was already at capacity before the attack, and Al Jazeera reported that Palestinians injured in the attack were being treated on the floor.
The Washington Post reported that there appeared to be an unexploded U.S.-made 250-pound bomb in the wreckage — not only indicating that Israeli forces used a U.S. bomb in the attack, but also indicating a major threat to Palestinians who may accidentally trigger the bomb later. Unexploded ordnances, which experts say comprise about 10 percent of bombs dropped, have already been confirmed to have injured multiple people in Gaza since October.
At the time of the attack, the school was acting as a shelter for 4,000 Palestinians displaced in Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza, and Israel has been steadily shrinking areas it deems “safe” over the past 10 months — while also bombing the so-called safe areas.
The school was also being used as a field hospital as part of the al-Aqsa operations, the hospital’s director told France 24. Israeli attacks across central and southern Gaza also killed at least 23 Palestinians on Saturday, amid Israel’s horrific raid on Khan Younis in recent weeks.
The school is just one of many in Gaza that Palestinians have been forced to use for other purposes — only for them to be bombed. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has reported that the vast majority of its schools have been turned into shelters amid the genocide, with most homes having been destroyed in Israel’s bombing campaign.
The bombing represents yet another attack on Gaza’s schools amid Israel’s scholasticide that has also destroyed every university in the Strip. On July 17, UNRWA observed that Israel had launched eight attacks on schools in Gaza just over the course of the previous 10 days, including attacks on UN-run schools that are now shelters.
At the same time, Israeli forces are killing Palestinians via their offensives of famine and disease, weaponizing Palestinians’ own bodies against them while also using enough U.S. weapons to equal the force of multiple nuclear bombs.
As a result, at least 10 percent of the population of Gaza has been killed, injured or is missing due to Israel, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported last week. This includes roughly 51,000 people killed, according to Euro-Med’s counts from hospitals and field teams, as well as those missing under the rubble or “disappeared” by Israeli forces and taken to torture camps outside of Gaza.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 275 new monthly donors in the next 3 days.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy