An Israeli army bombing of a school in Deir al Balah, in the southern half of Gaza, has caused thirty deaths, most of them women and children, this Saturday. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his official trip this week to the United States, Israel’s main ally. Both Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, although with different sensitivities regarding the conflict, have asked him to promote a ceasefire agreement that brings closer the end of the war in the Strip, which is on its way to 10 months and 40,000 dead.
Following the bombing of the Khadija school field hospital in Deir al-Balah, the same gruesome images of dismembered bodies of all ages, corpses strewn at the site of the rocket impact, the transportation of wounded people and races between alarmed and disbelieving survivors have been repeated and widely disseminated. “Chaos reigns inside the hospital as doctors try to provide the wounded Palestinians with essential medical care,” Tareq Abu Azzoum, a reporter for the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, reported from Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah.
The targeted site, like many others, is used as a shelter for thousands of people who have been pushed out of their homes during the conflict so that the Israeli army can supposedly fulfil its objective of destroying Hamas’ military capabilities. In fact, as on previous occasions, this is the justification given by military spokesmen for this latest attack: that the school houses a command centre for the radicals where they also store weapons.
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“The massacre at the Khadija school is a crime that confirms the Israeli enemy’s departure from all human values and its defiance of all the laws of war,” Hamas said in a statement, in which it also accused the United States of being an accomplice and called for help from the international community. The fundamentalist group denies Israeli accusations that it uses civilian and medical infrastructure for its military operations against the occupation troops. The army does not report how many civilians it has killed, but it does give the figure of 14,000 militants.
The Gaza loss “is by far the largest loss of personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” warned the commissioner general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, on his profile on the social network X. The number of employees of this agency killed in the current conflict alone amounts to almost 200, he said. “These are not numbers, they are our colleagues and our friends. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, support staff, technicians who dedicated their lives to supporting the community. Many were killed with their families, others were in the line of duty,” he added.
A few hours before the launching of several missiles at the school, the Israeli authorities had once again ordered the forced movement of thousands of people from several districts of Khan Yunis, a little further south than Deir al Balah, towards the area of Al Mawasi, a beachside area on the Mediterranean coast, which Israel describes as “humanitarian” and “safe” despite having attacked it several times. With this new order, the third in as many days, the army is leaving less and less space for the population in this city, whose urban centre has suffered immense damage after months of military siege.
In this town, the second in the Gaza Strip, the army operation that has been underway since Monday has already cost the lives of 170 Palestinians, according to emergency services. On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers together with members of the secret services managed to recover from a tunnel in Khan Yunis the bodies of five victims of the October 7 attacks that had been transported inside Gaza.
Negotiations in Rome
The violence is not limited to the southern half of the Strip. In the north, in different areas of Gaza City, clashes between the Palestinian armed resistance and the invading military remain intense, according to Hamas’ social media accounts. In addition to the direct clashes, they say that an attack on an enemy military vehicle left several dead and wounded, without giving further details, in the troubled Tel al Hawa neighborhood.
Negotiations on a possible ceasefire that would allow the release of the more than 100 hostages still in Gaza were another of the issues Netanyahu addressed on his trip to the United States. Rome is scheduled to host new talks starting this Sunday to bring the parties closer to a truce.
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