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 fifteen fifteen 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.
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