CAIRO: At least 30 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced people in Gaza on Saturday, Palestinian health officials said.

The Hamas-run government media office said 15 children and eight women were among those killed in the strike in the central town of Deir Al-Balah. More than 100 people were wounded, the media office and the Gaza health ministry said.

Israel’s military said it had targeted fighters operating there and that it had taken steps to reduce the risk to civilians.

Separately, nine people were killed in a rocket attack on a football ground in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday.

Eleven dead as rocket hits football pitch in occupied Golan Heights

At Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, ambulances rushed the wounded in for treatment. Some people arrived on foot, their clothes stained with blood.

Reuters footage showed people returning to the site of the bombing to check on their belongings, and fires burning in the area.

Um Hasan Ali, a displaced woman living at the school, said it had only been a couple of months since she returned to Gaza from Egypt with her daughter who had been taken there for medical treatment. Now her daughter had been wounded in the strike and taken to hospital, she said.

Another woman, Ibtihal Ahmed, told Reuters she was sitting in a neighbour’s tent when she heard heavy bombing.

“I started running, my daughter was one place and I was at another, I saw people running towards the place that was struck. The people sheltering in Khadija school are all wounded people, they are innocent and this should not happen to them,” she said.

On Saturday, the military said it had instructed Palestinians to evacuate the southern neighborhoods of Khan Younis and move to the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. Israeli attacks in Khan Younis on Saturday killed 14 people, health officials said.

UN and humanitarian officials accuse Israel of using disproportionate force in the war and of failing to ensure civilians have safe places to go, which it denies.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokes­pe­rson for Palestinian President Ma­h­­­moud Abbas, blamed the Isra­eli attacks on the support of the US.

Rocket attack

A rocket fired from Lebanon hit a football pitch in an Arab town in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on Saturday, killing 11 youngsters in what the army described as the “deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7”.

The Israeli army alleged that Lebanese group Hezbollah fired the deadly rocket that killed the youngsters aged between 10 and 20 years when they were hit on the pitch in the town of Majdal Shams.

Hezbollah denied it was responsible for the deadly strike. “The Islamic Resistance has no connection to this incident,” it said, referring to its military wing.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on X that 11 youngsters were killed in the attack, while the emergency service Magen David Adom said 19 others were wounded when the rocket hit Majdal Shams.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2024