School attack makes a Gaza peace deal even more distant

Less than 24 hours after the US announced it will unlock an additional $3.5bn (£2.75bn) of military aid to Israel, the scenes of devastation from the latest Israeli strike on Gaza filtered in.

- BEL TREW

Al-Tabaeen school and mosque, which had been sheltering displaced people, was hit in Gaza City. Pieces of flesh and pools of blood smeared the torched ground of the destroyed building in videos shared from the scene. The Palestinian Civil Defence, in Gaza, said more than 90 people had been killed, including 11 children and six women. The Hamas-run government in the besieged strip said the death toll was closer to 100.

A senior surgeon at al-Ahli hospital, which is treating the wounded, told The Independent they had received at least 70 identifiable bodies alone, and 10 completely unidentifiable body parts. “They were in parts, heads, upper limbs – we couldn’t identify them at all,” he said in a voice note.

The Israeli military declined to reply directly to a request for comment from The Independent. They pointed to a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, by the IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani. He claimed 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, including senior commanders, were operating from the school compound, “using it to carry out terrorist attacks”. “The compound, and the mosque that was struck within it, served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility,” he added, doubting the death toll communicated by the authorities in Gaza.