An Israeli air strike on a school being used as a shelter in central Gaza City killed at least 36 people on Sunday, the Hamas-run civil defence said, in the deadliest single incident inside the enclave since the November ceasefire frayed earlier this spring. The Fahmi al-Jarjawi school in the Daraj neighbourhood had been sheltering several hundred displaced families when two munitions struck the upper floors shortly after evening prayer.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal said the dead included 18 children and six women, and that more than 55 people were injured. Verified footage circulated overnight showed a young girl trapped in flames trying to escape the building; survivors brought to al-Ahli Arab Hospital arrived with severe burns. The hospital, which lost most of its surgical capacity to earlier strikes, was forced to triage patients in its courtyard.
The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas command node operating inside the school complex but did not provide evidence and offered no immediate response to the casualty figures. No evacuation warnings were issued before the strike, residents said, although Israel has in recent weeks ordered the depopulation of several districts in northern Gaza ahead of operations the army has described as "targeted."
The strike comes seven months after the multi-stage ceasefire brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar nominally halted full-scale fighting. Human-rights monitors say Israeli forces have killed at least 880 Palestinians in Gaza in the period since, bringing the total Palestinian death toll from the war to 72,797. Israeli authorities dispute the methodology behind those counts.
Politics inside Israel sit behind much of the renewed violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a national election in September and his right-wing coalition partners have made clear that any further concessions to Hamas, including a phased exit from the Philadelphi corridor, would prompt them to leave the government. The Board of Peace, the US-led international council overseeing Gaza’s administration, has struggled to enforce ceasefire terms in the absence of consensus among its members.
Reaction from regional capitals was sharp. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt issued separate condemnations on Monday morning, and Egyptian foreign minister Badr Abdelatty said Cairo would summon the Israeli ambassador. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that the strike pattern of the past month, if sustained, would erase what limited progress had been made on aid access in the spring.
The Fahmi al-Jarjawi school had been one of about 40 UN- and municipality-designated emergency shelters still in operation across Gaza City; many residents had moved into school buildings after their homes were destroyed in earlier rounds of fighting. UNRWA, which lost contact with two of its staff in the building, said it was attempting to verify their fate on Monday.