100 Palestinians killed in Israeli attack on Gaza school

More than 100 Palestinians were killed and dozens of others injured in an Israeli bombing of a school in the Gaza City in the early hours of Saturday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said, reported Xinhua.

The Al-Taba'een School sheltered many displaced people who were performing the dawn prayer when attacked, causing a large number of casualties, the media office said in a statement, adding that medical, civil defense, relief and emergency teams were not able to recover the bodies of all the slain victims.

Israeli warplanes bombed the school in the east of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, with three rockets and most of the injured that were transferred to the Ahli Arab Hospital in the city are in a very serious condition, the Palestinian official news agency WAFA reported.

Hamas condemned "in the strongest terms" the killings and held Israel and the U.S. administration fully responsible for this attack, its media office added in the statement.

The Palestinian presidency said in a statement that just after the U.S. administration announced the release of 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in military aid to Israel, an attack of this magnitude occurred, implicating the United States in the ongoing killings.

"The U.S. must press Israel to cease its aggression and adhere to international law. The U.S. must end the blind support that leads to the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, women, and the elderly," it added.

After the outbreak of the war in Gaza last October, some 154 installations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), including schools, training centers, warehouses and health centers, were transformed into emergency shelters for displaced people, said the UNRWA in early August.

As the war has continued for more than 300 days, UN statistics showed that in the war-torn Gaza Strip, about 63 percent of structures were assessed as destroyed or damaged, and debris generated by the current conflict is 14 times more than the combined sum of all debris generated by other conflicts since 2008, the United Nations Satellite Center said in August.

Humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip has been more than halved since the Rafah ground operation began and Rafah Crossing was abruptly closed in early May, according to an update released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Friday.

The aid has dropped from a daily average of 169 trucks in April to 94 trucks per day in May to less than 80 trucks per day in June and July, the update added.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that the airstrike it carried out on Saturday morning targeted a Hamas military headquarters.

The IDF said that the headquarters was located in a school compound near a mosque, serving as a shelter for civilians in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City.

"The command and control center served as a hideout for Hamas terrorists and commanders, from which various attacks were planned and advanced against IDF troops and the State of Israel," the statement said.

According to the Israeli army, many measures were taken before the attack to reduce the chance of harming civilians, including the use of precision weaponry, optical means, and intelligence information.

Israel has been launching a large-scale offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to retaliate against a Hamas rampage through the southern Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, during which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.

The Palestinian death toll from ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has risen to 39,699, Gaza-based health authorities said in a statement on Thursday.