IDF rejects Hamas claim of over 90 dead after strike on terror operatives at Gaza school
Gaza hospital says it received over 70 bodies; army maintains it precisely struck command center with dozens of operatives, took steps to avoid harm to innocents
The Israel Defense Forces said Saturday it struck a command room that terror operatives set up at a school in Gaza City where Palestinian civilians were sheltering.
The Gaza Strip’s Hamas-run civil defense agency said over 90 people were killed in the airstrike, describing the incident as a “horrific massacre.” The IDF expressed heavy skepticism toward the claim, saying the numbers appeared to have been inflated.
The IDF said that according to its intelligence, at least 20 terror operatives, including “senior commanders,” were at the site when it was struck.
Fadel Naeem, director of the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, told The Associated Press that the facility received 70 bodies of those killed in the strike and the body parts of at least 10 others. The Hamas-rung health ministry said another 47 people were wounded.
Naeem said some of the wounded had severe burns and many had to have limbs amputated. “We received some of the most serious injuries we encountered during the war,” he said.
Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for the Hamas-run Palestinian Civil Defense, said in a televised news conference: “So far, there are more than 93 martyrs, including 11 children and six women. There are unidentified remains.”
Hamas had initially put the death count at over 100 but appeared to revise it down.
The military disputed claims that more than 90 Palestinians were killed in the strike. “According to a preliminary examination, the numbers published by the government media office in Gaza — which acts as a media arm of Hamas — are exaggerated and do not match the information available in the IDF, the precise munitions used, and the accuracy of the strike,” the IDF said.
The army said it had struck an “active” Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque in the al-Taba’een school complex, in Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood. It said the site was used by the terror operatives as a hideout and to plan and carry out attacks against IDF troops in Gaza and against Israel.
To mitigate harm to civilians in the strike, the IDF said it carried out “many steps,” including using aerial surveillance, “precision munitions,” and other intelligence.
It also accused Hamas of “systematically [violating] international law and [operating] from within civilian shelters, brutally exploiting the civilian population and institutions as human shields for their terror activities.”
The Hamas media office said the strikes hit when people sheltering at the school were performing dawn prayers, leading to the high casualty count.
The terror group claimed in a statement that “there were no militants” in the school when it was struck by the IDF. It falsely claimed that its fighters and members of other armed groups follow a “strict policy” of not being present among civilians.
According to military assessments, Hamas operatives are struggling to remain inside tunnels as the long war drags on and are therefore increasingly moving to above-ground sites, while hiding among innocents.
The IDF also said two days ago that it had struck Hamas command and control centers in schools in the Daraj and Tuffah neighborhoods. On Monday it said the commander of Hamas’s Sheikh Radwan Battalion was killed in an airstrike at a school in Gaza City.
Many shuttered schools have been used as shelters for displaced Palestinians amid the war, but Israel says Hamas regularly uses the sites to run its operations and hide from the IDF. It says it takes steps to ensure its strikes on such sites are precisely targeting the combatants and to limit harm to civilians.
On Friday morning, the IDF launched a new ground operation in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, following what it said was “intelligence indicating the presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure in the area.”
A day earlier, the military told Palestinians in the Khan Younis area to evacuate to an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone, ahead of renewed operations there.
Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, warned that the military would “forcefully operate” against terror groups in the area.
Some 1.9 million Palestinians of the 2.3 million Gazan population are currently in the humanitarian zone, located in the al-Mawasi area on the Strip’s coast, western neighborhoods of Khan Younis, and central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
The new offensive was aimed at preventing terror groups in the Gaza Strip from regrouping, the IDF said in a statement.
Israel has increasingly been carrying out pinpoint operations in Gaza in the ongoing war against Hamas, sparked by the terror group’s brutal October 7 onslaught in southern Israel that saw 1,200 people murdered and 251 taken hostage.
Israel has vowed to destroy the Palestinian group in retaliation for its October 7 attack, but agreed to resume talks next week for a ceasefire-for-hostages deal following intense diplomacy aimed at averting a region-wide conflagration.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 331.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
