ISRAELI forces have killed at least 17 Palestinians and injured another 80 in an attack on a school for displaced people in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.
Sunday’s bombing of the United Nations-run Abu Oraiban school is the fifth attack on a school turned shelter in the past week.
Palestinian Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal said the school was housing “thousands of displaced people” and that most of the dead were women and children.
Israel said its air force had attacked and “struck a number of terrorists who were operating in the area.”
The country’s military has repeatedly flouted international law by bombing UN buildings, schools and refugee camps in so-called “safe zones.”
On many occasions, Israel has sought to justify attacks on civilian buildings by alleging that Palestinian fighters were using them for military purposes, but it has provided no proof to support its claims.
Campaigners have accused Israel of employing disproportionate use of force against civilians in Gaza. More than 38,600 people, most of them women and children, have been killed in nine months of relentless bombardment.
Israeli air attacks killed at least 90 people on Saturday in al-Mawasi, another designated safe zone.
UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, has had 190 of its facilities, more than half, bombed by Israeli forces.
Reporting from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud said he had witnessed severely burned women and children “crying out in pain and agony” on the floor after being brought into the hospital.
“This is the result of incinerating bombs,” he added.
Since the October 7 cross-border attack by Hamas that sparked Israel’s current military onslaught, the country’s forces have launched attacks against more than 400 schools in Gaza and destroyed some 88 per cent of all educational facilities.
A June report by the UN Human Rights Council found that Israel’s repeated attacks on schools and other civilian infrastructure appear to be violations of international law.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk noted tat humanitarian law “lays out the very clear obligations of parties to armed conflicts that make protection of civilians a priority.”
In an initial ruling, the International Court of Justice found in January that Israeli attacks in Gaza could plausibly be described as genocide.
On top of wrecking most of Gaza’s schools, Israeli attacks have destroyed 60 per cent of the enclave’s homes, 80 per cent of its shops and 60 per cent of its roads.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said that Israeli forces had arrested 15 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, adding to the thousand already detained.
Human rights groups and international organisations have long alleged widespread abuse of Palestinian inmates in Israeli jails.
