GAZA: White body bags littered the floor and mourning filled the air after a school housing displaced Palestinians was struck with Israeli missiles Saturday -- a horrific and increasingly common sight in the Gaza war.
Dawn prayers were shattered by the early morning triple air strike from Israeli warplanes, which gutted Al-Tabieen religious school and mosque in Gaza City.
In the hellish aftermath, body parts were strewn around the rubble and charred, bloodied bodies slumped in the wreckage of the two-storey complex.
Grim-faced volunteers piled corpses in blood-stained blankets into an ambulance, as seriously wounded men lay groaning on the ground.
Gaza's civil defence agency said at least 93 people were killed, 17 of them women and children, making it one of the war's deadliest strikes. Israel's military disputed the death toll, saying the school was targeted with "precision munitions".
Such incidents have become a pattern in recent weeks. At least 14 schools sheltering Gaza's displaced have been hit since July 6, killing more than 280 people.
As the sun climbed and mourners gathered, one man stroked the face of a dead child shrouded in a plastic body bag.
Mohammad Al-Mughayyir, director of the supply and equipment department of Gaza's civil defence service, said that six schools in Gaza City had been targeted in the past week alone.
Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Nadav Shoshani said that about 20 Palestinian fighters were operating from the Al-Tabieen complex.
Later on Saturday, Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told journalists that the strike "directly targeted" two floors of the school.
The strike hit "the upper floor housing women and children and the ground floor that was used for prayers by the displaced people," he said.
An independent, UN-appointed rights expert accused Israel of committing "genocide" in its Gaza war after an Israeli strike targeting the school.
"Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighbourhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one safe zone at the time," Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said on social media platform X.
Israel was carrying out such strikes against Palestinians using "US and European weapons", Albanese said. "May the Palestinians forgive us for our collective inability to protect them," she added.
Israel's retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,790 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza. — AFP
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