White body bags littered the floor and an atmosphere of mourning pervaded the air after Israeli missiles struck a school housing displaced Palestinians on Saturday – a horrific and increasingly common scene in the Gaza war.
Dawn prayers were disrupted by a triple airstrike by Israeli fighter jets in the early morning, destroying the Al-Tabini religious school and mosque in Gaza City.
In the aftermath of the hellish incident, body parts were scattered around the rubble and charred, blood-soaked corpses lay in the rubble of the two-storey complex.
Grim-faced volunteers loaded bodies wrapped in blood-stained blankets into ambulances, while the seriously injured lay groaning on the ground.
Gaza’s civil protection agency said at least 93 people were killed, including 17 women and children, making it the deadliest attack of the war.
The Israeli military disputed the death toll, saying the school was targeted with “precision weapons” because it “served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility”.
Such incidents have become common in recent weeks. At least 14 schools sheltering Gaza’s displaced have been attacked since July 6, killing more than 280 people, AFP reports.
“Peaceful people – women, children and youth – were performing Fajr prayers as usual when suddenly a missile hit them,” said Abu Waseem, who lives nearby and came to survey the scene.
“They were reduced to ruins. Children were ripped apart and women were burned. What can we say or do? What can we do?”
– ‘They were just praying’ –
As the sun rose and mourners gathered, a man caressed the face of a dead child wrapped in a plastic bag.
“They dropped missiles on them while they were praying. Fear Allah, Arabs! Fear Allah!” one woman cried as she wailed near the bodies.
Another man looked lost as he held a small corpse wrapped in a blanket. Nearby, six body bags lay on the ground, three of them children. Torn Qurans lay on the window ledge.
“We woke up before dawn to the sound of the attack,” said Saqr, a neighborhood resident who gave only one name.
“We reached the spot and found bodies of civilians who were peacefully offering namaz there. We found bodies of children scattered on the road.”
“You couldn’t even recognise the bodies, the remains were scattered there,” another man said.
“The people who were attacked are displaced people taking refuge in a school. What is their fault? What have they done wrong?”
Mohammed al-Mugayyir, director of the supplies and equipment department of Gaza’s civil defence service, told AFP that six schools were targeted in Gaza City last week alone.
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said about 20 Hamas and Islamist militants were operating from the al-Tabini compound.
“The compound, and the mosque inside it, served as an active military facility for Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” he wrote on X.
Later on Saturday, Gaza Civil Defense Agency spokesman Mahmoud Bassal told reporters that two floors of the school were “directly hit” in the attack.
He said the attack targeted “the upper floors where women and children lived and the ground floor, which was used by displaced people for prayers.”
The Gaza war began with a Hamas attack on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures.
Palestinian militants took 251 people hostage, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, 39 of whom the Israeli military says are dead.
At least 39,790 people have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, although the ministry did not give a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
