Israel pressed its bombardment of Gaza on Saturday as a war cabinet minister looked set to carry through on his threat to quit a government under mounting pressure over its conduct of the military campaign. Strikes rattled various parts of the Gaza Strip and appeared to be focused on central areas of the Palestinian territory, witnesses and AFP journalists reported.
The onslaught persisted, despite scrutiny on Israel after its warplanes carried out an attack Thursday on a UN-run school that a Gaza hospital said killed 37 people. The Israeli military acknowledged it conducted the strike in the Nuseirat refugee camp, saying it targeted a base of Hamas.
Hamas accused the army of providing "false information".
The group said three people Israel listed as dead were actually still alive. UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees that ran the school, condemned Israel for striking a facility it said had been housing 6,000 displaced people. In a post on social media platform X, the agency said the "school turned shelter" had been hit "without prior warning".
"Targeting UN premises or using for military purposes cannot become the new norm. This must stop and all those responsible must be held accountable," it said. Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in Gaza of using civilian infrastructure, including UN-run facilities, as operational centers—charges the militants deny.
- 'Defenceless' - The war, now in its ninth month, has brought widespread devastation to Gaza, with one in 20 people dead or wounded, according to the health ministry.
Most of Gaza's 2.4 million inhabitants are displaced.
This grim reality was underscored by a strike whose aftermath, depicted in an AFP video, saw men salvaging what they could from a bombed-out Gaza City building and carrying away a shrouded body in a debris-strewn alley.
Maher al-Mughair, who lives nearby, recounted the attack on Friday, saying: "We heard what sounded like a drone firing a missile, followed by another coming from an F-16 fighter jet.
"So we checked and found women and children in pieces. What did the children and women do wrong? They are defenceless people, merely civilians," he told AFPTV.
In the same city on Saturday, five people were killed and seven wounded when an Israeli warplane bombed the Mhana family's home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, Gaza emergency services said.
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