Emma Graham-Harrison
The Guardian / September 12, 2024
UNRWA says attack on school sheltering refugees in Nuseirat led to highest death toll among its staff in a single incident
Israel has bombed a UN school sheltering displaced people in central Gaza, killing at least 18 people, including the shelter manager and five other UNRWA staff.
Al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat is home to about 12,000 displaced people, mostly women and children, the UN said. It has been hit five times since the start of the war in Gaza.
The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, called the attack “totally unacceptable” and said it broke international laws that protect civilians in war. “These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now.”
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he was “outraged” by the bombing. “The disregard of the basic principles of international humanitarian law, especially protection of civilians, cannot and should not be accepted by the international community.”
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said Washington would continue to urge Israel to do more to spare humanitarian sites. “We need to see humanitarian sites protected,” he told reporters while on a visit to Poland. “That’s something we continue to raise with Israel.”
Germany’s foreign ministry also condemned the attack and called on Israel to protect UN staff and aid workers.
The UN Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, has turned its schools across Gaza into shelters as Israeli airstrikes and ground operations forced most residents to flee their homes. An estimated 90% of people in Gaza are displaced, many moving to try to stay alive.
Israel said the strike targeted a Hamas “command and control centre” inside the school, but did not provide evidence or details. It has repeatedly bombed schools used as shelters for displaced people, claiming militants used the sites and their residents as human shields.
The airstrikes on Wednesday night were the deadliest for Unrwa staff since the start of the war, although previous attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in other schools.
“This is the highest death toll among our staff in a single incident,” the agency said. “Among those killed was the manager of the UNRWA shelter and other team members providing assistance to displaced people.”
It brings the total number of UNRWA staff killed in Gaza to 220, the agency head, Philippe Lazzarini, said on X. “Humanitarian staff, premises and operations have been blatantly and unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war.”
More than four in five schools in Gaza have been directly hit or badly damaged and will need reconstruction or substantial renovation, a UN survey found in July. The 650,000 children in Gaza have not been able to study for nearly a year.
Many have stayed in the school shelters despite the repeated attacks because they have nowhere else to go; swathes of the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble and tent encampments are overcrowded.
“Most of the people took refuge in schools and the schools were bombed,” Basil Amarneh from Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital told the AFP news agency, as children injured in the bombing were carried in by medics. “Where will people go?”
Earlier on Wednesday, six siblings, aged 21 months to 21 years, were killed in a strike on a home in southern Khan Younis, along with five other people, according to the European hospital, which received the casualties.
After more than 11 months of war, the death toll in Gaza is more than 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most are civilians, including women, children and older people.
More than 95,000 people have been wounded, with a quarter suffering “life-changing injuries” including amputations that will require years of support, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.
At least 22,500 people will need “rehabilitation services now and for years to come”, the WHO said, adding that Gaza had little capacity to offer that care as most hospitals and healthcare facilities had been damaged or destroyed. “The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s representative for the Palestinian territories.
The war began after Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October when about 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, and 250 taken hostage.
Efforts to broker a second ceasefire and hostage release deal, after a one-week pause in fighting last year, have repeatedly stalled, with both sides accusing the other of sabotage.
Hamas said on Wednesday it was ready to implement an “immediate” ceasefire with Israel in Gaza, based on a US proposal put forward in June, without new conditions from any party.
Emma Graham-Harrison is The Guardian’s senior international affairs correspondent
