Israel air strikes at school shelter kill 21 including 13 orphans, six woman

Gaza's civil defence agency reported 21 killed in an Israeli strike on Saturday, the latest attack on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians where the Israeli military said it targeted militants.

A spokesman for the civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said more than half the dead at the Gaza City school were children. According to witnesses, a group of orphans had earlier gathered at the building to receive sponsorship from a local aid group.

"Civil defence crews recovered (the bodies of) 21 people, including 13 children and six women", one of whom was pregnant, said Bassal.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip gave the same death toll for what the Israeli military said was "a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command-and-control centre... embedded inside" an adjacent school.

AFPTV footage showed the ground floor of the school-turned-shelter covered with concrete rubble and mangled chairs and tables, and a gaping hole in the ceiling of what appeared to be a classroom.

Thousands of Palestinians displaced by the Israel-Hamas war had sought shelter there, Bassal said.

There were "around 30 injured, including nine children (needing) limb amputations, as a result of an Israeli bombing on Al-Zeitun School C" in Gaza City, he said.

Israel's military said its target was in Al-Falah School, adjacent to the Al-Zeitun School buildings.

An AFP reporter at the scene confirmed that Al-Zeitun School C had been hit.

The military, without mentioning the casualties reported by Gaza's civil defence and health ministry, said it had taken steps "to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence".

Displaced Gazan Randa al-Nadim told AFP she saw a pregnant woman killed in the strike.

"Here a woman was martyred, and this is her blood on the stairs... we found her belly open and the fetus on the stairs," she said.

"Did the fetus fight Israel?"

It was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes on school buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged on for nearly a year since Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel.

  Warehouse hit  

A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni School in central Gaza on September 11 drew international outcry after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said six of its staffers were among the 18 reported fatalities.

The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where many thousands of Gazans have sought shelter -- a charge denied by the Palestinian militant group.

Hamas on Saturday condemned the strike on Al-Zeitun School C, describing it in a statement as "a war crime under American cover", a reference to Washington being Israel's most important military backer.

The vast majority of the Gaza Strip's 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the ongoing war, which was triggered by the October 7 attack.

In a separate incident on Saturday, Gaza's health ministry said an Israeli air strike hit a warehouse in a "densely populated" area in the south, killing "three health ministry personnel and a passer-by" and injuring six others.

"The warehouse was directly targeted with several missiles while doctors and staff were performing their duties, preparing to transport the medicines stored there to hospitals... that are facing severe shortages," a statement said.

Israel's military had no immediate comment on the warehouse strike.

At least 41,391 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians, have been killed in Israel's military campaign in Gaza since the war began, according to data provided by the health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged these figures as reliable.

Hamas's October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures, which includes hostages killed in captivity.

Out of 251 people taken hostage that day, 97 are still being held inside the Gaza Strip, including 33 who the Israeli military says are dead.