The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck two school compounds in northern Gaza that Hamas was using as a military base, while the family of a young Turkish American woman released an angry statement blaming Israel for her killing in a West Bank protest on Friday.
According to Gazan rescue services, an overnight Israeli strike on the Halimah al-Saadiyah school in the town of Jabaliya killed four people who had been sheltering in tents that displaced Palestinians have set up around the facility. A second strike on Saturday hit the Amr Ibn al-As school in Gaza city, which medics said had killed three people and wounded 20 more.
Israel’s military said in statements for each attack that it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting Hamas militants who were using the former school compounds as a base, but did not add whether anyone had been killed. In both statements, the military said that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians,” and blamed Hamas fighters for intermingling with Gaza’s civilian population.
Schools closed down in Gaza after Israel’s invasion, but many have been turned into makeshift shelters that now house tens of thousands trying to flee Israeli bombardment. Despite the risks, Gazans continue to crowd into the buildings, which provide toilets and running water that are in short supply elsewhere in the enclave.
The deaths from the latest strikes add to the more than 40,000 Palestinians who have been killed in 11 months of war, according to the Gazan health authorities. Their figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
U.N. officials and aid groups have said that no place in Gaza was truly safe for its nearly two million civilians, a vast majority of them having been displaced by the fighting,
Over recent months, Israel has ordered round after round of civilian evacuations and has repeatedly shrunk the size of the enclave’s designated “humanitarian zone” in central Gaza. The action has forced an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas, or to seek shelter around places they hope to be somewhat safer, such as hospitals and schools.
The Israeli military is also investigating the killing of the Turkish American woman, 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, on Friday. Her family released a statement Saturday blaming her death on Israeli soldiers and calling for an independent investigation.
“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully and violently by the Israeli military,” the family said. “A U.S. citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has called Ms. Eygi’s death “a tragic loss,” adding that “the most important thing to do is to gather the facts.”
Even as northern Gaza continues to face bombardment, Israel and Hamas have largely stood by their pledge to pause hostilities in areas where health care workers are conducting a polio vaccine campaign for children. Gaza’s Ministry of Health said that the vaccination drive that is taking place in the southern part of the enclave is now in its “final days,” and will then move to the north of the enclave.
The vaccine campaign reached around 350,000 children in Gaza as of Friday, which is about half of the children the drive aims to inoculate, according to the United Nation’s Children Agency, UNICEF.
Yet even as the effort to halt the spread of the disease appears to be succeeding, critics have argued that it does little to protect Gaza’s children from the deadly conditions civilians face daily in the enclave, which has been under bombardment since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, Palestinian news media outlets reported that a baby, Yaqeen al-Astal, had died of malnutrition. It added that the child was the 37th to die of hunger in Gaza since Israel imposed a stricter siege on the enclave in response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Although Gaza had already been under an Israeli blockade before the war, its current restrictions are so tight that even the entry of humanitarian aid has been severely limited. Officials from the Gaza Health Ministry were unable to immediately confirm reports of the child’s death from malnutrition.
Earlier this week, Victor Aguayo, the development director of UNICEF, said the agency had estimated that more than 50,000 children in Gaza were suffering from malnutrition. “There is no doubt in my mind that the risk of famine and a large-scale, severe nutrition crisis in Gaza is real,” he said.
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