There was no chance of not provoking carnage. One of the nature and scale that stick in memories. By deciding to hit a school complex in the Daraj district of Gaza City, which had been transformed into a shelter and was therefore full to bursting with displaced people, and by choosing to act during the dawn prayer, which brings believers together in the space set aside for this purpose, the Israeli army caused the deaths of more than 93 people, and wounded hundreds of others on Saturday, August 10.

According to the Gaza Civil Defense, three "missiles" (or bombs) hit the building and its vicinity. The school was sheltering around 250 displaced persons, the majority of whom were women and children. Civil Protection spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal reported that several strikes targeted two floors of the Al-Tabieen Quran School and the adjacent mosque with three missiles. "So far, there are more than 93 martyrs, including 11 children and six women," he said. Dozens of people were injured, some of whom are in intensive care, and "there are many unidentified body parts," he added.

Even on the scale of the destruction suffered by Gaza – where some 40,000 deaths have been counted since the start of the war in October 2023 by the Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas but whose figures are considered reliable – the images filmed after the strikes are bound to leave their mark. A basement littered with debris and intertwined bodies, stripped bare by the blast, covered in blood.

To explain this strike, the Israeli army insists on the presence of Hamas officials, notably a "Hamas command and control center embedded in the Al-Tabieen school." The army also claims that this school, "a hideout for Hamas terrorists and commanders," constituted a base from which the Islamist group could launch attacks and that "prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and intelligence information."

While some senior Israeli officers had, for some months now, started to think that the military intervention in Gaza had reached a kind of plateau and could only lead to a form of stalemate unless there was a ceasefire, the political establishment has decided otherwise. The army is therefore continuing the war, and believes it has scored decisive points recently by multiplying its targeted strikes, to demonstrate that the continuation of the conflict is possible.

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