At least 16 dead in Israeli air strike on school in Gaza Strip

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least 16 people were killed in an Israeli attack on a school in central Gaza that houses displaced families.

According to official reports, more than 50 people were injured in the attack on the building of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The Israeli military said it took precautions to minimize the risk to civilians before attacking armed Hamas militants who it said were using the area as a hideout to plan and carry out attacks on soldiers.

At the crime scene, Ayman al-Atouneh said he saw children among the dead.

“We ran here to look at the target area. We saw dismembered children’s bodies. This is a playground. There was a trampoline, swings and vendors,” he said.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Gaza Civil Emergency Service, said in a statement that the death toll could rise as many of the injured were in critical condition.

The attack has left the enclave with no safe place for families to leave their homes to seek shelter, he added.

Al-Nuseirat, one of the eight historic refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, was the scene of intensified Israeli bombing on Saturday. An earlier airstrike on a house in the camp killed at least 10 people and injured scores more, according to medics.

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The Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry said in its daily update on the death toll from the nearly nine-month-long war that at least 29 Palestinians had been killed and 100 others injured in Israeli military strikes across the enclave in the past 24 hours.

Five local journalists were among those killed in Saturday’s airstrikes, bringing the number of journalists killed since October 7 to 158, according to the Hamas-run government media office in the Gaza Strip.

According to Gaza health authorities, more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive. The Health Ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants – but most of the dead are civilians, officials say.

Israel has lost 323 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinians killed were fighters.

Israel launched its offensive aimed at eliminating the militant Islamist group Hamas in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 in which Israeli officials said 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage.

Additional reporting from Reuters