At around 1:30 am local time yesterday, Israeli Defense Forces launched a series of missiles yesterday at the al-Sardi school located in Deir al-Balah.
As a certified educational site, the site is prohibited from attack by combatants even in the fog of war. The coordinates were also well known to the government of Israel and its military, having previously been provided to them by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA).
Despite that, Israeli Defense Forces launched their aerial assault on this facility which acted both as an educational center and a place of refuge for over 6,000 Gazan residents with full deadly force. Using fighter jets to carry out their deadly mission, the IDF forces fired multiple U.S.-made and U.S.-supplied GBU 39 missiles into the second and third floors of the school.
The GBU 39 missiles were identified based on fragments found among the dead and the rubble after the shelling.
After the air strike, spokespersons for the IDF said this was a precision airstrike directed at a “Hamas compound embedded inside an UNRWA school in the area of Nuseirat”. It said the goal of the strike was to kill “20 to 30” members of Hamas and additional Islamic Jihad members they claimed were stationed there.
The IDF claimed those forces were using the school as a local operations hub.
When the bodies were counted after the raid, sources from within a nearby hospital and from Palestinians present at the site said at least 33 people were known killed by the raid and dozens more injured. In the chaos at the site early reports had the death count over 40, which it could still reach after sifting through the site of the bloodbath, but that larger number has not been confirmed at this time. At least 12 women and three children were among the dead, according to the hospital staff.
Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, said her organization’s own data said final death tolls might rise to 45 or more, with dozens additional badly injured and many in critical condition. She said it appeared the IDF had run several separate sorties on the school as part of the airstrike.
No proof has been found of any Hamas or Islamic Jihad operations center which Israel alleges justified the attack and the mass collateral damage.
Philippe Lazzarini, the director of the UN Relief Works Agency, responded quickly to what Israel had claimed, with it appears some care to avoid his agency being denied funding again over false claims that it is infiltrated and heavily influenced by Hamas personnel.
“Claims that armed groups may have been inside the shelter are shocking,” he said in a statement. “We are, however, unable to verify these claims.”
After denying the charges that Hamas forces were embedded at the al-Sardi school site, Lazzarini went on to remind all of how entirely twisted Israel’s position of what is justifiable in this war has become.
“UNRWA shares the coordinates of all its facilities – including this school – with the Israeli army and other parties to the conflict,” he continued. “Targeting UN premises or using them for military purposes cannot become the new norm.”
UNRWA communications director Touma said her organization had called “for investigations into all violations against the United Nations, including attacks on our buildings”, once again.
With Israel continuing to play the card that Hamas is using innocent Palestinians as human shields at those sites, and western powers doing little to challenge that justification for mass killings, even with investigations such as UNRWA is demanding little if anything is likely to happen.
After reports began to roll of the high death toll among innocent civilians from the strike, the IDF jumped in to counter that with their own messaging blitz.
That began with IDF spokesperson Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner saying that the IDF did not know anything about civilian casualties at the school.
While that might be understandable considering that the devastation was fresh and after-attack inspections had not yet happened, the statement itself flies in the face of continued Israeli assertions that it is taken extreme care to protect civilians from harm. If that were indeed important, the data on those casualties would have already been well understood and reviewed, after the fact, as would that the deaths and injuries of the innocents should never have happened.
Lerner ignored saying anything further about the clear proof of the murdered and maimed from the attacks. He instead doubled-down on explaining how, after Israeli forces had previously cleared out Hamas strongholds in central Gaza, they moved back in, fighting from small holed-up “cells” with guns, rifles, and small rocket-powered grenades to counterattack.
“[Hamas] understand[s] that we are cautious and careful around UN facilities, and they are trying effectively to use the UN facilities and building as their iron dome,” Lerner said, likening the UN offices to Israel’s U.S.-built “Iron Dome” mobile anti-missile defense system which is scattered around the nation.
“They will not have a safe place,” he added.
According to reports from the Associated Press and Reuters yesterday, Hamas issued its own response to the IDF allegations fiercely denying they had forces or any kind of command center at the school.
In an interview with reporters later in the day yesterday, Ismail Al-Thawabta called the Israeli explanation just another example of a continuing string of false narratives as it continues to justify having now slaughtered over 36,000 innocent Palestinians throughout Gaza.
“The occupation uses lying to the public opinion through false fabricated stories to justify the brutal crime it conducted against dozens of displaced people,” he said.