The Israel Defense Forces said Saturday it struck a Hamas command post that terror operatives set up at a school in Gaza City where Palestinian civilians were sheltering. The enclave’s Hamas-run civil defense agency said over 100 people were killed in the airstrike, describing the incident as a “horrific massacre.”
The army said it had “precisely struck Hamas terrorists operating within a Hamas command and control center embedded in the Al-Taba’een school” in Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood, from where they were “advancing terror operations against IDF forces and Israeli citizens.”
The statement said the IDF “took many steps in order to reduce the chance of harming civilians” before launching the strike using precision munitions. It also accused Hamas of “systematically violating international law and operating out of civilian shelters, while using the population as a human shield.”
The Hamas media office said the strikes hit when people sheltering at the school were performing dawn prayers, leading to many casualties. Medics had not yet been able to reach all the bodies, it said.
There was no immediate information from Gaza health authorities.
The IDF also said two days ago that it had struck Hamas command and control centers in schools in the Daraj and Tuffah neighborhoods. On Monday it said the commander of Hamas’s Sheikh Radwan Battalion was killed in an airstrike at a school in Gaza City.
Many shuttered schools have been used as shelters for displaced Palestinians amid the war, but Israel says Hamas regularly uses the sites to run its operations and hide from the IDF. It says it takes steps to ensure its strikes on such sites are precisely targeting the combatants and to limit harm to civilians.
On Friday morning, the IDF launched a new ground operation in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, following what it said was “intelligence indicating the presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure in the area.”
A day earlier, the military told Palestinians in the Khan Younis area to evacuate to an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone, ahead of renewed operations there.
Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, warned that the military would “forcefully operate” against terror groups in the area.
Some 1.9 million Palestinians of the 2.3 million Gazan population are currently in the humanitarian zone, located in the al-Mawasi area on the Strip’s coast, western neighborhoods of Khan Younis, and central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
The new offensive was aimed at preventing terror groups in the Gaza Strip from regrouping, the IDF said in a statement.
Israel has increasingly been carrying out pinpoint operations in Gaza in the ongoing war against Hamas, sparked by the terror group’s brutal October 7 onslaught in southern Israel that saw 1,200 people murdered and 251 taken hostage.
Israel has vowed to destroy the Palestinian group in retaliation for its October 7 attack, but agreed to resume talks next week for a ceasefire-for-hostages deal following intense diplomacy aimed at averting a region-wide conflagration.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 331.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.