EPAThe UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) says six of its employees have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a school it runs in central Gaza.
Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said a total of 18 people were killed in Wednesday’s strike on al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat refugee camp, which is being used as a shelter by thousands of displaced Palestinians.
Israel’s military said it carried out a “precise strike on terrorists” planning attacks from the school.
On Thursday, the military alleged that nine of those killed were members of Hamas’s armed wing and that three of them were Unrwa staff.
Unrwa said the Israeli military had not requested a list of the staff who were killed, and that the names published by the military had not been previously flagged to the agency by Israeli authorities.
Earlier, UN Secretary General António Guterres condemned the strike, saying: “What’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable.”
“These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, hit out at Guterres’ criticism.
“It is unconscionable that the UN continues to condemn Israel in its just war against terrorists, while Hamas continues to use women and children as human shields,” he said.
Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist group by Israel, the UK and other countries – has denied using schools and other civilian sites for military purposes.
Israeli forces launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
More than 41,110 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
EPAUnrwa said Wednesday’s strike on al-Jaouni school had resulted in “the highest death toll among our staff in a single incident” since the start of the war.
It was also the fifth time the school had been hit over the same period, it added.
Video of the aftermath showed hundreds of people inspecting the heavily damaged ground floor of one wing of the school, as well as the remains of an adjoining structure that appeared to have been destroyed.
Other footage showed ambulances bringing wounded men, women and children said to have been hurt in the strike to al-Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah.
“My friend and her children were injured, and the director and deputy director [of the shelter] were martyred. They were inside the office when the shelling started,” one woman told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme.
“It’s hard to describe the horrible scene where their bodies were torn into pieces,” she added.
Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said on Wednesday night that 18 people were killed, including Unrwa staff members, children and women, and that 18 others were injured.
A Telegram post from the agency identified one of those killed as the daughter of one of its rescue workers, Momin Salmi. It said he had not seen Shadia for 10 months because he had stayed in northern Gaza while his wife and their eight children had fled southwards.
The BBC was not able to independently verify the death toll, but a medical source at al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat camp told AFP that a total of 15 people killed in the strike had been brought there and to al-Aqsa hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Wednesday that aircraft had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control centre” embedded inside al-Jaouni school.
“Numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence,” it added.
“This is a further example of the Hamas terrorist organisation’s systematic abuse of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.”
Gaza’s Hamas-run government media office accused Israel of a “brutal massacre”.
Later, Unrwa said in a statement that two air strikes had hit the school and its surroundings, which were home to around 12,000 displaced people, mainly women and children.
“Among those killed was the manager of the Unrwa shelter and other team members providing assistance to displaced people,” it said.
The agency insisted that “schools and other civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times”, adding: “They are not a target.”
“We call on all parties to the conflict to never use schools or the areas around them for military or fighting purposes.”
EPAOn Thursday afternoon, the IDF put out a statement saying that it had repeatedly requested from Unrwa the names of the employees who were killed in the strike, but that it had received “no answers”.
It then named nine men who it alleged were “Hamas terrorists… confirmed to have been eliminated in the strike”.
The IDF said all nine were members of Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, and that three of them were “simultaneously an Unrwa employee”.
Three names featured on a list of the six Unrwa workers which was earlier released by the UN.
“How long will the UN continue to bury its head in the sand and ignore the fact that Hamas terrorists have taken over Unrwa?” Mr Danon said.
“These murderers are not aid workers. They are terrorists with blood on their hands and were rightly eliminated.”
Unrwa’s communications director, Juliette Touma, said Israeli authorities had not requested a list of staff killed from the agency.
“The names that appear on today’s statement from the Israeli Army have not been flagged to us before by the Israeli authorities in previous occasions prior to today,” she said.
“Unrwa shares the lists of all its staff with the host governments and in the context of the West Bank and Gaza also with the state of Israel as the occupying power.”
Ms Touma also stressed that Unrwa had repeatedly called on the warring parties to never use civilian facilities for military purposes.
“Now whether this particular school or other have been used for that very purpose, Unrwa is not in a position to determine,” she added. “This is precisely why we have repeatedly called for independent investigations to look into these very serious claims.”
Israel has previously accused Unrwa of supporting Hamas.
The agency has denied this, but the UN said in August that it had fired nine of Unrwa’s 13,000 staff in Gaza after investigators found evidence that they might have been involved in the 7 October attack. Another 10 staff were cleared because of insufficient evidence.
Israel also alleged that hundreds of Unrwa staff were members of terrorist groups, but a UN review published in April found Israel had not provided evidence for its claims.
Hours before the incident, Unrwa said in a situation report that almost 70% of its schools in Gaza had been hit during the war.
It also reported that 214 of its staff members had been killed, along with at least 563 displaced people who had been sheltering inside its schools and other installations.
In a separate development on Wednesday, the IDF announced that two Israeli soldiers had been killed and eight others injured in a helicopter crash overnight in southern Gaza.
The helicopter was on a mission to evacuate a critically injured soldier to a hospital for medical treatment and crashed while landing in the Rafah area, a statement said.
“An initial inquiry conducted indicates that the crash was not caused by enemy fire. The cause of the crash is still under investigation,” it added.
