Gaza: US demands transparency from Israel after attack on school building

The US is demanding a full investigation into the deadly air strike by Israeli forces on a school building in the Gaza Strip. Even if Israel’s army tried to kill 20 to 30 extremists, but children were killed in the process, “that shows that something is wrong,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Thursday (local time). “These are all issues that still need to be verified, and that is what we want to see.”

According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians (UNRWA), the school building in the Nuseirat refugee district served as emergency accommodation. According to Palestinian authorities, at least 30 people were killed in the attack, while the Islamist Hamas group reported 40 deaths. Medical sources said that most of the victims were women, children and young people. The information could not initially be independently verified.

School in Gaza Strip also used as emergency accommodation

According to the Israeli army, 20 to 30 members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were in three classrooms during the attack. According to initial findings, many of them were killed in the attack. Intelligence information had previously indicated that there were “no women or children” in the affected rooms, said army spokesman Daniel Hagari. The school had been under surveillance in recent days and the attack had been postponed twice to avoid civilian casualties, another army spokesman said. This information cannot currently be independently verified either.

Miller spoke of a difficult situation. Israel has the right to take action against extremists if they are hiding there. At the same time, however, they are holed up near civilians and Israel has an obligation to minimize harm to civilians. Israel’s government and armed forces must be “fully transparent about what happened there.”

Since the beginning of the war, school buildings belonging to the UN Palestinian relief agency have often served as a place of refuge for internally displaced persons – also in the hope that Israel’s army will not deliberately attack the UN buildings. Israel, in turn, accuses Hamas of operating from civilian facilities and thereby endangering civilians or deliberately using them as a human shield.

Hagari announced that the identities of the terrorists killed would soon be revealed. Some of them were involved in the massacre on October 7 last year – the worst in the history of the State of Israel. At that time, fighters from Hamas and other extremist groups entered Israel from the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 hostages in the coastal area controlled by Hamas.