Bel Trew
The Independent / August 10, 2024
The airstrike on Al-Tabaeen school and mosque, which has reportedly left more than 100 people dead, is yet another escalation in the spiraling conflict.
Less than 24 hours after the US announced it will unlock an additional $3.5bn of military aid to Israel, the scenes of devastation from the latest Israeli strike on Gaza filtered in.
Al-Tabaeen school and mosque, which had been sheltering displaced people, was hit in Gaza City.
Pieces of flesh and pools of blood smear the torched ground of the destroyed building in videos shared from the scene.
The Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza said that more than 90 people had been killed, including 11 children and six women. The Hamas-run government in the besieged strip said the death toll was closer to 100.
A senior surgeon at Al-Ahli Hospital, which is treating the wounded, told The Independent they had received at least 70 identifiable bodies alone, and 10 completely unidentifiable body parts. “They were in parts, heads, upper limbs – we couldn’t identify them at all,” he said in a voice note.
The Israeli military declined to reply directly to a request for comment from The Independent. They pointed to a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, by the IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani. He claimed 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including senior commanders, were operating from the school compound, “using it to carry out terrorist attacks”.
“The compound, and the mosque that was struck within it, served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility,” he added, doubting the death toll communicated by the authorities in Gaza.
But those on the ground in the tiny strip told me the area was crammed with over 300 desperate displaced families, and that women and children were among the dead.
And there have been multiple instances where schools sheltering displaced people have been hit by Israeli strikes in the past. Negotiators involved in truce talks have told me repeatedly that every time there is a major strike on civilians, it piles immense pressure on the ceasefire negotiations – which were supposed to start again in just five days.
Israel denies it is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure or committing crimes in its devastating war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’s bloody 7 October attacks when more than 1,000 people were killed and over 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli counts.
But the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said on Saturday that, alongside Al-Tabaeen, at least 10 schools have been targeted in the last few weeks, adding there is “no justification for these massacres”.
“We are dismayed by the overall death toll. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the war,” he added on X.
In fact, in the last seven days alone Israel has attacked seven schools sheltering displaced civilians – which is one a day – according to Action for Humanity. (The Independent contacted the Israeli military for comment but is yet to receive a reply.)
“Each of these schools were crowded with displaced civilians sheltering, in what we are concerned was a potential policy of targeting schools turned shelters,” the Manchester-based charity said in a statement.
It called on the UK in particular to halt weapons sales to Israel. On Friday the State Department announced Washington will provide Israel with an additional $3.5bn to spend on US weapons and military equipment.
At the same time, both the UK and the US keep calling for a truce deal to end the devastating loss of civilian life, pull the Middle East region back from the brink, and see the return of the hostages whose lives are also in extreme danger.
Right now civilians in Gaza – which had a pre-war population of over 2 million – have nowhere to run to in a maze of evacuation orders from the Israeli military, the latest of which was issued this week around Khan Younis. They are under fire from aircraft, naval ships, drones, tanks, and soldiers – and under blockade, which according to UN officials has sparked a famine.
Their only hope is a ceasefire and hostage release deal, talks for which were supposed to resume on Thursday in either Qatar’s capital Doha or the Egyptian capital of Cairo.
In signs of global desperation for an end to the spiraling conflict, which has ricocheted well past the borderline to Gaza, US president Joe Biden, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani all signed the statement backing the 15 August talks.
Dozens killed in a strike on a school sheltering the displaced will only make reaching an agreement more impossible.
Bel Trew – International Correspondent
