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An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people, rescuers said, and hundreds of thousands in the Rafah area are fleeing in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s newly announced campaign to “divide up” the Gaza Strip.
Three missiles hit Dar al-Arqam school in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon, the civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said, killing several children and wounding 100 people.
The building was being used as a shelter for Palestinians displaced from their homes. In a statement, the Israeli military said it had taken precautions to avoid civilian casualties in the bombing of what it described as a control centre for the militant group Hamas.
Another 20 people were killed in a dawn airstrike on the Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, bringing the total number of casualties reported by the local health ministry to 97 in the past 24 hours.
The intense wave of Israeli bombing comes amid a major expansion of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory following Israel’s decision to abandon a two-month-old ceasefire two weeks ago.
The Israeli military said on Thursday it had struck more than 600 “terror targets” across the strip since resuming large-scale airstrikes on 18 March. Gaza’s health ministry, which the UN relies on for casualty data, says 1,163 people have been killed in bombings since the ceasefire collapsed.
On Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the army was “seizing territory” and “dividing up” Gaza. Israel has cut off humanitarian aid, food and fuel to the strip for over a month in an effort to pressure Hamas.
He did not elaborate on how much Palestinian land Israel intended to capture in the renewed offensive, but according to Ocha, the UN humanitarian agency, the IDF has declared 64% of the territory military buffer zones and “no-go” zones for civilians.
Netanyahu’s latest announcement has renewed fears of permanent displacement for the strip’s 2.3 million residents. It is also likely to inflame worries that Israel intends to permanently take control of the territory.
On Thursday, local media footage showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the southern city of Rafah and surrounding areas, as Israeli ground troops advanced to create Netanyahu’s newly announced security corridor. Movement was impeded, however, by at least three Israeli strikes on the two main roads leading north.
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The “Morag route” is named for a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting the new military zone will separate the two southern cities in the same manner as Israel’s Netzarim corridor, just south of Gaza City.
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which Israel says 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken captive. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 50,357 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Efforts led by Qatari and Egyptian mediators to restart ceasefire talks have so far failed.
