GAZA CITY (Dispatches) -- An Israeli airstrike on an UNRWA-run school sheltering displaced people in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, martyred at least 20 people, according to Palestinian health officials on Monday.
Women wept as men wrapped the bodies in shrouds before burying them.
“We had considered this school to be safe,” Umm Muhammad Ashour, who had sought refuge in the school, told Middle East Eye. Ashour says she saw children’s bodies “without heads, without legs”.
The Zionist military claimed it struck Hamas fighters operating from a compound that previously served as a UN school, accusing them of using the premise as a training camp.
It did not provide evidence to back up its claim. Many children were among the killed, according to witnesses.
The victims included a woman and her daughters who, according to Ashour. “Their mother was searching everywhere to get them food,” she said, adding that the children had decided to sleep without having dinner.
Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, said she met with children injured in Sunday’s strike on the school turned shelter. They included a 17-year-old girl who suffered a severe leg injury and shrapnel wounds. She survived along with her twin sister and three other sisters, Wateridge said.
Their mother died and Wateridge said one of the sisters described “how their mother’s bones were crushed under the rubble. There was nothing they could do to save her.”
Wateridge also met with two siblings aged 2 and 5 at Nasser Hospital where the casualties were taken. Both children have severe head and body injuries, with 2-year-old Julia losing sight in her eye. “There is nothing we can do. We are already waiting for the next attack,” Wateridge quoted a doctor as telling her.
Mahmoud, whose brother was killed in the strike, said that his family was getting ready to rest when the strike happened.
“We hadn’t been sat for five minutes when we suddenly heard something falling,” he told MEE. “We were not seeing anything; it was grey everywhere. I started calling for my siblings, my parents, my children, I could not see anything.”
By the time rescuers arrived with some flashlights, Mahmoud was desperately looking for his children.
“I heard my four-months-old son screaming,” he said. “What has he done for me to have to pull him out of the rubble? I then heard my eldest son, who is two, screaming but I could not find him. I kept digging until I got him out of the rubble.”
People kept digging through the rubble, trying to salvage any clothes or belongings, as the displaced Palestinians in the school dealt with another blow to what little remained of their sense of safety.
“We have been searching for a safe place, but there is no safe place,” said Ashour, who has been displaced on multiple occasions since her home in northern Gaza was destroyed.
“Where is international law that is supposed to defend the oppressed?” she asked. “What do children have to do with this?”
 The death toll in the Gaza Strip from the 14-month Israeli war topped 45,000 people on Monday, Palestinian health officials said, with 52 dead arriving at hospitals across the bombed-out strip over the past 24 hours.
The Gaza Health Ministry has said that more than half of the fatalities are women and children. 
The Health Ministry said 45,028 people have been martyred and 106,962 wounded since the start of the Israeli war. It has said the real toll is higher because thousands of bodies are still buried under rubble or in areas that medics cannot access. The latest war has been by far the deadliest waged by the Zionist regime on Palestinians, with the death toll now amounting to roughly 2% of Gaza’s entire prewar population of about 2.3 million.
Among the dead reported in the overall toll were 10 people, including a family of four, who were killed in an overnight Israeli strike in Gaza City, Palestinian medics said.
The strike late Sunday hit a house in Gaza City’s eastern Shijaiyah neighborhood, according to the Health Ministry’s emergency service. Rescuers recovered the bodies of 10 people from under the rubble, including those of two parents and their two children, it said.
In central Gaza’s Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network who was killed Sunday in a strike on a point for Gaza’s civil defense agency. They carried his body through the street from the hospital, his blue bulletproof vest resting atop.
The strike also killed three civil defense workers, including the local head of the agency, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.