Israeli Airstrike on UNRWA School in Gaza Kills 18, Including Six UN Staff Members
Israeli forces targeted a school which is operated by the United Nations in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 18 people, including six members of UNRWA, on Wednesday. The school under siege had been transformed into a shelter for the displaced Palestinian families. It was accommodating about 12,000 people –the majority of whom were women and children– at the time of the attack.
In addition, UNRWA said this particular attack on the al-Jaouni school was the single worst incident in terms of killing its staff members since the war on Gaza began 11 months ago. This was the fifth time the school had been affected during the ongoing war. The agency released a statement saying that they were saddened and angered that no one is immune to the continuing violence happening in Gaza.
In the eyewitness accounts made, most of its victims were women and children, and it was a scene of destruction. It was a Palestinian mother who survived the operation but lost all her six children in the strike. She wondered, ‘What crime did my children commit?’ As the siren wailed, she underscored the size of the tragedy for civilians in search of shelter.
Tareq Abu Azzoum, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, said: They are pulling out people from the building. There was an enormous collapse, enormous destruction. Ambulances and fire brigades had no safety gear or other required tools, and they just used bare hands to search for survivors in the piles of rubble.
The Israeli military said its forces had conducted the air strike. However, it stated that they had been aiming at a Hamas command and control facility, which had been established in the vicinity of the compound of the school. It alleged this but threatened to provide documentation to support the same, which it never did. The incident forms another chapter of the attacks on the schools in Gaza, with at least six schools having been targeted from August 1. These hospitals were supposed to be safe zones and shelters and have been bombed several times, in which many innocents have lost their lives.
William Deere, director of UNRWA Washington Office, also expressed a similar fate in the strikes against UN installations that have claimed the lives of 220 of its employees. He labeled the situation as ‘totally unacceptable’ and demanded accountability and investigations into the attacks.
The bombing of al-Jaouni happened a few days after a rise in raids conducted by the Israel air force where they attacked a house in Khan Younis, killing 11 people, a bakery in Gaza City that claimed the lives of three people and seriously injured seven others. The Palestinian Health Ministry said that the 11-month violent conflict had killed over 41,000 people, with more than 95,000 others wounded.
UN chief Antonio Guterres urged ‘Nobody to die’ and said it was distressing that nobody was being held answerable for the death of humanitarian workers. With Gaza on the receiving end of constant bombings, the international response of demanding a ceasefire and safeguarding the lives of the innocent went unanswered, with thousands of Palestinians being rendered homeless and living in extremely poor conditions in sheltered areas, which should be safe havens for the affected population.
