ISRAELI air strikes across Gaza today and the day before hit a United Nations school sheltering displaced families and two homes, killing at least 34 people, including children.
An official from the world body said that six staff members of UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, were among the dead.
Air strikes by the Israeli military also targeted several towns in the occupied West Bank, killing eight people, as its attacks spread despite ceasefire efforts.
One of the children killed in the strike on the UN-rune al-Jaouni Preparatory Boys School in the Nuseirat refugee camp was the daughter of Momin Selmi, a member of Gaza’s civil defence agency which rescues wounded people and retrieves bodies in the wake of Israeli attacks.
Survivors said that they had been forced to step over “shredded limbs” to escape the rubble.
“Humanitarian staff, premises and operations have been blatantly and unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini wrote in a posting on X.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres condemned the strike, saying: “What’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable.
“These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now.”
UNRWA said the attack marked the “highest death toll among our staff in a single incident,” noting it was the fifth time the school had been hit over the past 11 months.
More than 90 per cent of Gaza’s school buildings have been severely or partially damaged by Israeli strikes and more than half the schools housing displaced people have been hit, according to a survey in July by the Education Cluster, a collection of aid groups led by Unicef and Save the Children.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed at least 41,084 Palestinians and wounded another 95,029 since October 7 last year, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
World Food Programme (WFP) director Cindy McCain revealed yesterday that an Israeli air strike last month had demolished the top floor of a guest house where the UN agency’s international workers were staying.
The previously undisclosed incident occurred on August 31, also in the Nuseirat refugee camp, just days after the WFP had temporarily stopped aid deliveries to northern Gaza and halted staff movements after its team came under fire near an Israel checkpoint.
“It was always dangerous before. It’s become impossibly dangerous now,” Ms McCain said.
Israel forces “are hitting places where we’ve been told it was safe, we have been told have been deconflicted and that refugees were safe,” she said. “And it’s not the case. It’s not.”
