At least 35 people have been killed this Thursday in an Israeli aerial bombardment on a UN school housing displaced people by the war, according to Juliette Touma, the Director of Communications at UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA, in its acronym in English) that manages the school, and estimates between that number and 45 those killed in the attack. Jalil al Dakran, spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, in nearby Deir al Balah, has reported 35 deaths, five of them children, while the Ministry of Health of the Hamas Government assures that there are at least 27. In the images captured by television cameras in the hospital, at least 15 bodies can be seen wrapped in bags, as well as several injured people, including children and women. The Israeli army recognizes the attack, but speaks of a “precise” operation to assassinate Hamas militiamen who had established a stronghold there.
One of the spokespersons for the Israeli army, Peter Lerner, has assured in a video conference with journalists that the airstrike targeted three rooms in which there were between 20 and 30 Hamas militiamen, some of whom participated in the attack on September 7. October. “We are confident that we have limited and reduced the damage to civilians in the attack.” […] “We are sure of our intelligence information and that the terrorists were there,” he assured. The Hamas Executive has described the presence of fighters in the school as a “lie” and “invention.”
The school attacked is located in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza. It is one of the areas from which troops had withdrawn and where they have begun a new ground operation against Hamas gunmen who are using guerrilla tactics and trying to reorganize.
Israel maintains the bombings in different parts of Gaza with the same force despite the call last Friday by the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to end the war now. Hamas has asked the mediators for clarification because the proposal to end the war that Biden presented on Friday as an Israeli differs from the one actually presented by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Executive. The Islamist movement agrees to hand over all the hostages in its hands in phases (124) as long as it implies a permanent ceasefire.
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Netanyahu, whose far-right partners threaten to leave the coalition if he seals the agreement, refuses a permanent ceasefire without first “destroying” Hamas’s ability to fight and govern Gaza, something that, in his opinion, has not happened yet.
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