An Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza kills at least 27 people

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip killed at least 27 people on Thursday, Palestinian medical officials said. The Israeli military said it targeted militants, but people sheltering there said the strike hit a meeting of aid workers.

Israel has continued to strike at what it says are militant targets across the Palestinian enclave even as attention has shifted to its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and rising tensions with Iran. The military launched a large-scale air and ground operation against Hamas in northern Gaza earlier this week.

In a separate development, the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon said an Israeli tank fired on its headquarters in the town of Naqoura, hitting an observation tower and wounding two peacekeepers, who were hospitalized. The attack drew widespread condemnation and prompted the Italian Defense Ministry to summon Israel’s ambassador in protest.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the incident.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission known as UNIFIL said in a statement that its headquarters and nearby positions “have been repeatedly hit.” It said the Israeli army also fired on a nearby bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, damaging vehicles and a communication system. It said an Israeli drone was seen flying to the bunker’s entrance.

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The reports came as the Israeli military continued to pound Hezbollah targets in Lebanon while the militant group kept up its rocket attacks, setting off air raid sirens in parts of northern Israel.

Lebanon’s crisis response unit said Israeli shellfire and airstrikes killed 28 people and wounded 113 in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 2,169 killed and 10,212 people wounded in Lebanon since the war erupted last October. Hezbollah attacks have killed 28 civilians in northern Israel since the war began, as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, including both in northern Israel since last October and in southern Lebanon since Israel’s invasion.

Lebanese authorities said the latest Israeli attacks have focused on southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, where on Thursday they said Israeli strikes killed four people and wounded 17 in the village of Karak.

There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military.

Aid group says staff killed in strike on school

The strike in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah killed 27 people, including a child and seven women, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where the bodies were brought. It said several other people were wounded.

An Associated Press reporter saw ambulances streaming into the hospital and counted the bodies, many of which arrived in pieces.

The Israeli military said it carried out a precise strike targeting a militant command and control center inside the school, without providing evidence. Israel has repeatedly attacked schools that were turned into shelters in Gaza, accusing militants of taking cover in them.

Witnesses said the strike occurred while school managers were meeting with representatives of an aid group in a room normally used by Hamas-run police who provide security. They said there were no police in the room at the time.

The Palestinian branch of Terre des Hommes, a Swiss aid group, said in a statement that members of one of its children’s health teams were killed in the strike, though it did not specify how many.

“There were no militants. There was no Hamas,” said Iftikhar Hamouda, who had fled from northern Gaza earlier in the war.

“We headed to tents. They bombed the tents ... In the streets, they bombed us. In the markets, they bombed us. In the schools, they bombed us,” she said. “Where should we go?”

The Hamas-run government operated a civilian police force numbering in the tens of thousands. They largely vanished from the streets after the start of the war as Israel targeted them with airstrikes, but plainclothes Hamas security personnel still exert control over most areas.

Hamas has continued to launch attacks on Israeli forces and fire occasional rockets into Israel more than a year after the Palestinian militants’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that ignited the war.

The militants stormed into Israel in that attack, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. They are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were fighters but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced around 90% of its population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times.

UN peacekeepers caught in intensified fighting in Lebanon

UNIFIL, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The United Nations expanded its mission following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, sharply condemned Israeli strikes on UNIFIL that wounded two peacekeepers as “an inadmissible act, for which there is no justification.”

“Another line has been dangerously crossed in Lebanon,” he wrote on the social media platform X.

From Italy, which has about 1,000 soldiers deployed as part of UNIFIL, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said her government formally protested to Israeli authorities. Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto went further, claiming Israel deliberately targeted the UNIFIL base in southern Lebanon in strikes that “could constitute war crimes.”

Several other countries, including France and Jordan denounced the Israeli attacks.

Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure right along the border in violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war. It has warned people to evacuate from dozens of communities in southern Lebanon, many of which are outside the buffer zone.

The U.N. peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said last week that the peacekeepers were staying in their positions on Lebanon’s southern border despite Israel’s request to vacate some areas before it launched its ground operation against Hezbollah. Crosetto endorsed that, saying that “the U.N. and Italy cannot accept orders from the Israeli government.”

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in support of Hamas and the Palestinians, drawing Israeli airstrikes in retaliation.

The fighting steadily escalated, and eventually boiled over into all-out war in recent weeks, with Israel carrying out waves of heavy strikes across Lebanon and launching the ground invasion. Hezbollah has expanded its rocket fire to more populated areas deeper inside Israel, causing few casualties but disrupting daily life.

Israel says the ground invasion, which has so far focused on a narrow strip along the border, is aimed at pushing the militants back so that tens of thousands of Israelis can return to their homes in the north. The fighting has displaced over a million people in Lebanon. The country’s crisis unit reported Thursday that 822 of the 1,000 makeshift shelters hosting displaced civilians nationwide have reached full capacity.

Iran — which supports Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed groups across the region — launched some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel last week in retaliation for the killing of top Hamas and Hezbollah militants.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday that its response to the Iranian missile attack will be “lethal” and “surprising,” without providing further details, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with President Joe Biden.

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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut and Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.

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Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.