Condemnation mounted on Thursday of a deadly Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in central Gaza, but Israel said that the compound, crowded with people driven from their homes, had become a command center for militant fighters.
The site, Al-Jaouni School, had been home to around 12,000 displaced people from the Gaza Strip, mainly women and children, according to the United Nations agency that operated the school. Israel has struck the compound five separate times since the war began last October, the agency said.
The Palestinian authorities said the Israeli strike on Wednesday killed 18 Gazans, including women and children, and injured a similar number. The primary U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said six of its employees, including the shelter’s manager, were among the dead — the most U.N. employees to die in a single strike in a war that has killed more than 200 of them.
Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, on Thursday added his voice to the criticism from the United Nations and others, calling the deaths of the U.N. workers “appalling” and reiterating calls for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The government of Qatar, a key mediator in talks over a cease-fire, called the strike a “horrifying massacre.”
The Israeli military defended the strike, which it said killed nine members of Hamas’s military wing. It said the compound in Nuseirat was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has made repeatedly to justify increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.
Israel issued a list of nine names of people it said were Hamas militants who had been killed in the attack, including three who it said were employees of UNRWA.
Addressing the claim that some of the U.N. workers killed were also Hamas fighters, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said, “We are not in a position to confirm it, deny it,” so an independent investigation is called for.
As for whether Hamas used the school compound as an operations center, Mr. Dujarric told reporters at a news briefing, “if people were visibly misusing it, we would know,” and that there had been no such obvious signs.
U.N. officials, without naming Hamas, said it would violate international law for an armed combatant group to embed itself among civilians, using them to “shield a military objective from attack,” as Hamas routinely does. But they criticized Israel more directly, saying that 16 times in August alone the Israeli military had attacked a school compound, many of which now serve as shelters for those who have fled their homes during the war.
The bombing in Nuseirat “emphasizes the Israeli military’s systematic failure to comply with international humanitarian law,” the Palestine office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.
During more than 11 months of war, Israel has said it has targeted and killed thousands of Hamas militants. But the relentless bombardment and ground operations have come at a cost in civilian lives and physical destruction that even many of Israel’s allies have condemned. More than 40,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to the health ministry there, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
“The pattern of attacks,” the U.N. human rights office said, “suggests a complete disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians and raises grave concerns about the systematic commission of disproportionate attacks or attacks directed at civilians, which are war crimes.”
Israel says its strikes “are conducted in accordance with international law” and that Hamas has exploited schools, hospitals and shelters, using them as bases and civilians as human shields. With nearly each strike on a school or hospital compound, it has said that it took steps to reduce the chance of harming civilians.
Israel’s increasing strikes on school grounds appear to reflect a shift in its efforts to root out Hamas in Gaza. Some military analysts say that as Israel has destroyed Hamas fighting units and part of the group’s network of tunnels, it has forced more fighters above ground.
With the first anniversary of the war just weeks away, the military announced Thursday that a top Israeli intelligence commander, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, had announced his resignation. General Sariel led Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, which was long seen as a pillar of a vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus.
But he drew criticism after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack caught Israel by surprise, because his unit had stopped monitoring Palestinian radio traffic that might have given away the plan. In April, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the head of military intelligence, resigned saying he wanted to “take responsibility.”
In January, Israel accused a dozen United Nations workers of participating in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel or its aftermath, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.
The United Nations fired 10 of the 12 employees Israel had accused. An internal U.N. investigation later found that Israel had not provided evidence to back up its separate allegation that many UNRWA workers had ties to Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.
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