People remove the corpse of a person killed in an Israeli strike on a school in Gaza City on August 10, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Gaza City, August 12 (RHC)-- Gaza's civil defense agency says Israel has carried out airstrikes on 13 shelter centers housing displaced Palestinians in the besieged strip since the beginning of August, calling on the international community to immediately intervene to stop the occupying regime’s massacre of Palestinian civilians and displaced persons.
Mahmoud Basal, the spokesman of the Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, made the remarks in a news conference over the weekend, following the Israeli bombing of the al-Tabi’in school-turned-shelter in the al-Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City earlier in the day.
Basal went on to say that the Israeli strike had hit a floor housing women as well as another floor that served as a prayer room for displaced civilians, adding that the attack had resulted in numerous casualties, with many people still unaccounted for.
“We demand the world to intervene immediately to stop the massacres against defenseless civilians in shelters,” he said.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed following Israeli airstrikes on a school sheltering displaced people in the east of the Gaza Strip as the occupying regime presses ahead with a months-long aggression on the besieged territory.
Israel bombed the al-Tabi’in school as the citizens were performing the dawn prayer, leaving more than a hundred people dead and many more injured.
Local media reports, citing witness accounts, said there were about 250 people inside the prayer hall at the school when it was struck by Israeli bombs while displaced people were performing the dawn prayer.
Witness accounts suggest many of the dead and injured are civilians, including women, children and the elderly.
Condemnations have poured in from across the world following the Israeli regime’s genocidal airstrikes on the al-Tabi’in school.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has condemned the increasing frequency of Israeli attacks on schools housing displaced Palestinians, saying the latest was “conducted with apparent disregard for the high rate of civilian fatalities”.
The UN human rights office said this is at least the 21st strike on a school-turned-shelter that it has recorded since July 4, adding that these strikes have resulted in at least 274 fatalities, including women and children.
It also noted that despite Israeli military claims that “all measures are taken to avoid civilian harm, the repeated strikes on shelters in areas to which the populations have been forced to move, and the consistent and predictable impact on civilians, suggest a failure to strictly comply with obligations required by International Humanitarian Law.”
Israel unleashed its brutal war on Gaza on October 7 last year after Hamas carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have since been killed, most of them women and children, and upwards of 91,000 others injured in the merciless Israeli aggression. More than 1.7 million people have been internally displaced as well.
The Tel Aviv regime has also imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
