Horrifying images have emerged from Israel’s latest attack on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City, with a video purporting to show a young girl scrambling for safety after the classroom she was sleeping in was engulfed by flames.
In an 11-second clip shared on the messaging site Telegram, a young girl can be seen trying to make her way out of a burning classroom following a deadly Israeli strike on the Fahmi Al-Jargawi girls’ school.
Health officials told reporters they had recovered the severely burned bodies of 31 people, including children, after the late-night strike.
It was unclear whether the child who featured in the video survived the attack.
Other footage taken from the school showed blood-stained walls and charred mattresses lying on the floor, as rescue workers and distraught parents searched for survivors.
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Wearing a blood-soaked polo shirt, Ahmed Sameeh, a displaced Palestinian who had sought shelter at the school with his family, said his daughter was among the dozens injured in the attack.
“This is the blood of my little daughter who I was carrying on my shoulder,” he told Al Jazeera Arabic.
“She’s three years old and she had a fractured skull. We are nothing but defenceless, peaceful civilians,” he added.
‘We are nothing but defenceless, peaceful civilians’
– Ahmed Sameeh, survivor
Bushra Rajab, another displaced Palestinian and survivor of Monday’s attack, said she was awoken by the sounds of people screaming for help shortly after midnight.
“We woke up to the sound of a big explosion. Many were killed and many were injured,” she told Al Jazeera Arabic.
“Some of those were my relatives. I ask God almighty to bestow his mercy upon them.”
Using its usual justification, the Israeli military has said, without providing any evidence, that the school was a “command and control centre” for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movements.
In a joint statement with the security agency Shin Bet, it said the school “was used by the terrorists to plan and gather intelligence in order to execute terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and [army] troops”.
Despite the high death toll, the statement claimed that Israel took numerous steps “to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.
International humanitarian law forbids attacks on civilian infrastructure, including schools. But Israel has repeatedly bombed schools, mostly being used as shelter by displaced people, throughout its 19-month war on Gaza.
‘No place is safe’
Shortly after the attack, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said its shelters were “overwhelmed with displaced people desperately seeking safety” while “no place is safe and no area has been spared from hostilities”.
“Many families are sheltering in abandoned, unfinished, or damaged buildings,” Unrwa said, while others, “including children and pregnant women, are sleeping in the open”.
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Sanitation conditions are also “dire”, the agency warned, with hundreds of people “having to share a single toilet”.
Since the war erupted, Israeli forces have killed at least 53,000 Palestinians, including more than 28,000 women and girls, according to Palestinian health and government officials.
The figure also includes at least 1,400 health sector professionals, 280 UN aid workers – the highest staff death toll in UN history – and at least 180 journalists, the highest number of media workers killed in conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began recording data in 1992.
In January, the medical journal the Lancet reported that fatalities were probably underreported by 41 percent.
The study estimated that 59.1 percent of those killed were women, children and people over the age of 65. It did not provide an estimate of Palestinian fighters among the dead.
That toll represented 2.9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, “or approximately one in 35 inhabitants”, the study said.
