Israeli forces' bombing of a school in Gaza City causes severe casualties

On August 10, 2024 local time, Israeli forces bombed a school in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 100 Palestinians and injuring dozens. It is reported that the school provided shelter for the displaced.

The Israel Defense Forces issued a statement on the same day, saying that the Israeli air force precisely struck a Hamas command center located in the Tabin School adjacent to a mosque in Gaza City "based on intelligence". The Israeli side claimed that it was one of the hiding places for Hamas members, from where Hamas "advanced terrorist operations against the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli citizens". The Israeli side also said that they had taken several measures "to reduce the possibility of harming civilians" before launching the attack.

However, the media office of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) issued a statement on August 10, strongly condemning the "appalling massacre" by the Israeli forces and stating that this act was clearly a "crime of genocide and ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinian people. The statement said that the number of victims was large, and medical teams, civil defense teams and rescue emergency teams have so far been unable to find the bodies of all the victims. The statement pointed out that the Israeli occupying forces and the US government are fully responsible for this "massacre", calling on the international community and international organizations to condemn this act and pressure Israel to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and prevent the Gaza Strip from "running with blood".

Previously, the Israeli forces launched air strikes on two schools in Gaza on August 8. On August 9, according to news from both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, the Israeli forces' air strikes on multiple facilities in the Gaza Strip on August 8 killed dozens of people. The Israeli forces issued a statement in the afternoon of August 8, saying that the Israeli forces attacked two command and control centers of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza City on the same day. According to the Israeli forces, these two command centers were located in two schools, where armed personnel planned and carried out attacks against Israel. Senior official of the Gaza Strip's civil defense department, Mohammed al-Moghayer, accused the Israeli forces of this air strike "obviously targeting schools and secure civilian facilities in the Gaza Strip", and the attack on the two schools resulted in more than 18 deaths, another 60 injuries and more than 40 missing.

Since the outbreak of the new round of the Palestine-Israel conflict on October 7, 2023, Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip have killed more than 39,000 Palestinians and injured over 91,000.