Dozens Martyred in Israeli Bombing of Girls School

Date: 28 July 2024 - 22:21

News ID: ۱۲۹۸۳۲

GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) -- Israeli airstrikes on a girls’ school in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, martyred at least 30 people and wounded over 100 on Saturday, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Khadija Girls’ School was sheltering over 4,000 displaced Palestinians, according to civil defense officials in the enclave. A field hospital was also operating inside the school complex.
“I am so lucky to have survived,” Fadel Keshko, a 22-year-old man who was staying in the school with his sick grandmother and nephew, told Middle East Eye.
“The building I took shelter in was directly targeted. The distance between me and the rocket was just a meter away. I am horrified and terrified.”
Keshko and his relatives have since fled to Khan Younis, where the Zionist military is currently attacking areas previously designated as humanitarian zones.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “I am displaced from the north of Gaza. Now, it’s another round of displacement. I don’t know where I should go.”
Israeli fighter jets fired three missiles at the field hospital in the school, the government media office in Gaza said in a statement.
The Zionist military claimed it hit a Hamas “command and control centre” embedded in the school, without providing any evidence.
The military has regularly used this claim to justify strikes on hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructures in Gaza. It has scarcely provided evidence.
Footage from the scene on Saturday showed the school floor filled with debris as rescuers attempted to take away bodies and carry wounded Palestinians.
Keshko described “blood splashed over the floors, mothers crying in pain and panic”.
“No one could even imagine that this would happen,” he added. “It’s a school that shelters originally war-wounded survivors and their companions. I can’t even take a breath. I can’t talk. I no longer feel I will stay alive.”
Eyewitness Mostafa al-Rafati said he saw “children, women, heads, arms, legs, a scene of ghosts”.
He described seeing the person next to him suddenly fly away the moment the strikes hit, in what he called “a horrible scene”.
“I thought I was dreaming, I kept hitting myself because I could not believe what was happening.”
Umm Ahmad Fayed, a displaced woman who took shelter in the school with her family, said she could not find her daughter after the strike.
“I do not know where my daughter is,” she told MEE. “Her clothes, bed, and all her stuff are destroyed, but I do not know if they saved her, if she is dead, if she is alive, I do not know.”
“I am looking for her [everywhere].”
Umm Ahmad’s daughter was staying in a room with other displaced girls, which was damaged by the strikes.
When the attack happened, Umm Ahmad was taking care of her husband, who was brought to the school from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital shortly before the school attack.
“He was taken from Al-Aqsa hospital to here because it was supposedly safe, but there is nowhere safe in Gaza.”
More than 39,000 Palestinians have been martyred by Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since October 7, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The occupying regime continues its atrocities in the Gaza Strip with the express intention of “eliminating” Hamas.
On Saturday, Zionist officials admitted that the regime has failed to completely understand the “spider web” of the underground tunnel network developed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip after over nine months of aggression.
Israeli Channel 12 cited unnamed Israeli officials and officers saying that the tunnels have enabled Hamas to carry out “an organized defensive battle” against the Israeli military.
“It’s like a spider web, if you cut one tunnel, alternative tunnels will automatically appear and this can continue,” said one of the unnamed officials.
“We still do not have a complete understanding of the tunnel network, and we lack a firm and absolute control over the entire tunnel project,” another official was quoted as saying by Channel 12.
The Israeli channel cited other sources as saying that Hamas fighters

have effectively used these tunnels to launch surprise attacks, managing to disappear underground and strike simultaneously from multiple locations.
They said the Palestinian resistance group uses the tunnels to move forces and logistical equipment throughout Gaza, suggesting that dismantling the network and restoring security would require a prolonged and sustained conflict.
“When the ground invasion of the Strip began on Oct. 27, 2023, the Israeli army encountered Hamas’s capability to conduct an organized defensive battle from underground,” the report said, quoting an unnamed officer.
Haaretz reported on Friday that the “Atlantis Project,” an expensive Israeli military plan to flood Gaza’s tunnels with seawater, was “lost”.
“It turns out that Atlantis is lost; it’s no longer in use, and nobody in the army can say what benefit, if any, was gained from this expensive project,” the report said.