A wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting central and southern Gaza have killed at least 50 and injured an estimated 200 people, with one strike hitting a school where thousands were seeking shelter.
Palestinian health ministry officials said that at least 30 people were killed in an airstrike on the Khadija school in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, resulting in a wave of critical injuries.
Wounded people poured into the nearby Aqsa hospital, while images from Deir al-Balah showed families carrying injured children for treatment.
The Associated Press reported that people searched the ruined classrooms for remains, combing through the rubble to gather body parts.
They added that close to the hospital, where those killed in the strike were taken, their reporters witnessed people fleeing as an ambulance drove in the opposite direction. Inside the ambulance, they said, lay a dead toddler as well as a body shrouded in a blanket.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they targeted the Khadija school in Deir al-Balah because the area was used as a “command and control complex,” by Hamas militants.
They claimed “many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians”, including precision weapons and intelligence, although tens of thousands of civilians have sought shelter in Deir al-Balah for months, crowding into every available piece of space after many were displaced several times from other parts of Gaza.
The strike in Deir al-Balah was accompanied by further strikes on Khan Younis, after a week of deadly fighting in Gaza’s second city. Strikes in Khan Younis killed at least 23 people and wounded 89, according to Palestinian health officials, as civilians were forcibly displaced from the city for the fourth day.
The IDF said a map demonstrating areas where civilians should seek shelter would be “adjusted”, owing to the dangers associated with rockets fired towards Israeli territory as Hamas militants were present in a designated humanitarian area.
They called on Palestinians in the south of Khan Younis to “temporarily evacuate”, to a shrinking humanitarian zone in the coastal area of al-Mawasi, where hundreds of thousands have fled in recent months after fighting in the southern city of Rafah as well as a renewed Israeli assault on Khan Younis.
“The early warning to civilians is being made in order to mitigate harm to the civilian population and keep civilians away from areas of combat,” they said.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, estimates that more than 80% of the Gaza Strip “has been placed under evacuation orders or designated as a no-go zone”, while many seeking shelter there describe being displaced upwards of five times. Israeli airstrikes have also targeted areas previously designated as safe.
The UN’s office for humanitarian affairs (OCHA) said earlier this week that evacuation orders in Khan Younis were “issued in the context of ongoing attacks by the Israeli military and gave no time for civilians to know from which areas they were required to leave or where they should go”.
OCHA labelled these mass evacuation orders “confusing” and said Israeli forces issued demands for civilians to flee while increasing their attacks on the same areas, as well as potential escape routes.