ISRAEL killed and wounded scores of people, bombing a school and tents housing displaced refugees in Gaza today.
At least 23 people were killed when the al-Razi school in Nuseirat, run by the UN refugee agency, was targeted. Save the Children deplored the “horrific” attack, saying: “The healthcare and education systems are being decimated before our eyes. Children cannot continue to be at the forefront of this conflict. Hospitals and schools should never be targets.”
Gaza’s ruling group Hamas pinned the blame on Israel’s suppliers, saying: “The US administration, led by President Biden, bears full responsibility for this systematic killing of our people, with its continued political and military support for the occupation and its army, and because of its obstruction of international justice in pursuing Israeli war criminals.”
The latter would also implicate the new British government, which has backtracked on suggestions it would drop objections lodged by its Conservative precursor to the prosecution of Israeli leaders by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Britain is arguing that because Palestinian negotiators at the Oslo talks of the 1990s agreed not to pursue war crimes charges against Israeli leaders as part of a peace process, the ICC cannot prosecute Israelis for anything they do to people in occupied Palestine.
The second-deadliest strike of the day hit tents in Muwasi near Khan Younis, supposedly a safe zone designated by the Israeli military for Palestinians to flee to.
Doctors at Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital said 17 people were killed in the strike.
It occurred in the same area where health officials say more than 90 Palestinians, including children, were killed by a strike on Saturday that Israel said was targeting Hamas’s top military commander, Mohammed Deif. His status remains unclear.
Though Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the official death toll from Israel’s invasion at 38,713, a study by British medical journal The Lancet says this does not take into account bodies lost under rubble and indirect deaths caused by disease and starvation caused by the destruction of infrastructure. It estimated the true toll could be as high as 186,000, or 8 per cent of the territory’s population.
