GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israel faced international condemnation Thursday after a strike killed 18 people at a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in war-torn Gaza, where the Israeli military said it targeted Hamas militants.
The attack flattened part of the UN-run Al-Jawni school in Nuseirat on Wednesday, leaving only a charred heap of rebar and concrete.
“For the fifth time, Israeli forces bombed the UNRWA-run Al-Jawni School, killing 18 citizens,” Gaza civil defense spokesperson Mahmud Bassal wrote on Telegram, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA later said six of its staff had been killed in two Israeli strikes on the school and its surroundings, calling it the highest death toll among its team in a single incident.
“Among those killed was the manager of the UNRWA shelter and other team members providing assistance to displaced people,” it said on X. “Schools and other civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times, they are not a target.”
The Israeli military said it had conducted a “precise strike” on Hamas militants within the school grounds. It did not elaborate on the outcome, but said “numerous steps” were taken to reduce the risk to civilians.
UN chief Antonio Guterres branded the strike “totally unacceptable.”
His condemnation was echoed by Israeli ally Germany, which said “humanitarian aid workers must never be victims of rockets.”
Jordan and the European Union also criticized the attack, while Israel’s main backer the United States called on it to protect humanitarian sites.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was “outraged” by the deaths and that the strikes showed a “disregard of the basic principles” of international humanitarian law.
US Secretary of State Blinken said: “We need to see humanitarian sites protected, and that’s something that we continue to raise with Israel.”
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said UNRWA had not provided the names of its killed workers, “despite repeated requests.”
He said a military inquiry found that “a significant number of the names (of the dead) that have appeared in the media and on social networks are Hamas terrorist operatives.”
In response, UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma said the agency was “not aware of any such requests,” that it provided Israel each year with a list of its staff and that it “called repeatedly” on Israel and Palestinian militants “to never use civilian facilities for military or fighting purposes.”
She said the agency was “not in a position to determine” if the school had been used by Hamas for military purposes, but UNRWA had “repeatedly called for independent investigations” into “these very serious claims.”
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said the school was “no longer a school” and had become “a legitimate target” as it was used by Hamas to launch attacks.
UNRWA, which coordinates nearly all aid into Gaza, has been in crisis since Israel accused a dozen of its 30,000 employees of being involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks that sparked the war.
The UN immediately fired the implicated staff members, and a probe found some “neutrality related issues” but stressed Israel had not provided evidence for its chief allegations.
Survivors of the strike scrambled to recover bodies and belongings from the rubble, saying they had to step over “shredded limbs.”
“I can hardly stand up,” a man holding a plastic bag of human remains told AFP.
“We’ve been going through hell for 340 days now, what we’ve seen over these days, we haven’t even seen it in Hollywood movies, now we’re seeing it in Gaza.”
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said after the school strike that at least 220 members of the agency’s staff had been killed in the war.
“Endless & senseless killing, day after day,” he posted on X.
“Humanitarian staff, premises & operations have been blatantly & unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war.”
Across Gaza, many school buildings have been repurposed to shelter displaced families, with the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people repeatedly uprooted by the war.
In Gaza City, civil defense spokesman Bassal said two strikes in the Zeitun neighborhood killed seven people — including two children.
Later, he said two people were killed in the Jabalia camp. Medical sources said five people were killed in strikes on the Khan Yunis area.
The bloodshed shows no signs of abating despite months of ceasefire negotiations mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.
A Hamas delegation met Qatari and Egyptian mediators in Doha on Wednesday, the Palestinian Islamists said, though there was no indication of a breakthrough.
The October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Among the dead included in that count were hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliation has killed at least 41,118 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
Deadly Israeli strike on Gaza school draws global condemnation
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Deadly Israeli strike on Gaza school draws global condemnation
- UN chief Antonio Guterres branded the strike “totally unacceptable”
- EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was “outraged” by the deaths
Biden calls on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations to end war
- We call for all parties to this conflict to end this violence and refrain from fueling it, for the future of Sudan, Biden says
WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden on Tuesday called on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations to end a war that has been ongoing for more than 17 months.
“We call for all parties to this conflict to end this violence and refrain from fueling it, for the future of Sudan and for all of the Sudanese people,” Biden said in a statement.
“I call on the belligerents responsible for Sudanese suffering— the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)— to pull back their forces, facilitate unhindered humanitarian access, and re-engage in negotiations to end this war.”
Israel planted explosives in Hezbollah’s Taiwan-made pagers, sources say
- The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls
BEIRUT: Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
The details shed light on an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts.
The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring.
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.”
“The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.
Neither Israel nor Gold Apollo immediately responded to Reuters requests for comment.
Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo, based in Taipei.
Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on Oct. 7.
“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
Iranian president pledges deeper ties with Moscow, state media says
- The United States views Moscow’s growing relationships with Pyongyang and Tehran with concern and says both are supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for use in the conflict in Ukraine
MOSCOW: Iran’s president committed his country to deeper ties with Russia to counter Western sanctions on Tuesday, state media reported, amid US worries that Tehran is supplying Moscow missiles to hit Ukraine.
Russia’s top security official Sergei Shoigu arrived in the Iranian capital days after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. More than two and a half years into its conflict with Ukraine, Moscow has been seeking to develop ties with the two nations, both hostile to the United States.
“My government will seriously follow ongoing cooperation and measures to upgrade the level of relations between the two countries,” the state IRNA news agency quoted Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian as telling Shoigu, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council.
“Relations between Tehran and Moscow will develop in a permanent, continuous and lasting way. Deepening and strengthening relations and cooperation between Iran and Russia will reduce the impact of sanctions.”
The United States views Moscow’s growing relationships with Pyongyang and Tehran with concern and says both are supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for use in the conflict in Ukraine.
Iran has denied sending ballistic missiles to Russia. Moscow has said only that Iran is Russia’s partner in all possible areas.
Shoigu’s trips are taking place at a crucial moment in the war, as Kyiv presses the United States and its allies to let it use Western-supplied long-range weapons to strike targets such as airfields deep inside Russian territory.
President Vladimir Putin said last week that Western countries would be fighting Russia directly if they gave the green light, and that Moscow would respond.
The Nour news agency, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Shoigu met his Iranian opposite number, Ali Akbar Ahmadian. There was no immediate information on the outcome of the meeting.
Russia has repeatedly said it is close to signing a major agreement with Iran to seal a strategic partnership between the two countries.
Shoigu was Russian defense minister until May, when he was appointed secretary of the Security Council that brings together President Vladimir Putin’s military and intelligence chiefs and other senior officials.
Apart from meeting North Korea’s Kim last week, he also held talks in St. Petersburg with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Israel has a long history of pulling off complex attacks like the exploding pagers
- Israel rarely takes responsibility for such attacks, and its military declined to comment Tuesday
JERUSALEM: Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were quick to blame Israel for the nearly simultaneous detonation of hundreds of pagers used by the militant group’s members in an attack Tuesday that killed at least nine people and wounded nearly 3,000 others, according to officials.
Many of those hit were members of militant group Hezbollah, but it wasn’t immediately clear if others also carried the pagers. Among those killed were the son of a prominent Hezbollah politician and an 8-year-old girl, according to Lebanon’s health minister.
The attack came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among those injured by the pager explosions.
Israel rarely takes responsibility for such attacks, and its military declined to comment Tuesday. However, the country has a long history of carrying out sophisticated remote operations, ranging from intricate cyberattacks to remote-controlled machine guns targeting leaders in drive-by shootings, suicide drone attacks, and the detonation of explosions in secretive underground Iranian nuclear facilities.
Here is a look at previous operations that have been attributed to Israel:
July 2024
Two major militant leaders in Beirut and Tehran were killed in deadly strikes within hours of each other. Hamas said Israel was behind the assassination of its supreme leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran’s capital. Although Israel didn’t acknowledge playing a role in that attack, it did claim responsibility for a deadly strike hours earlier on Fouad Shukur, a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut.
July 2024
Israel targeted Hamas’ shadowy military commander, Mohammed Deif, in a massive strike in the crowded southern Gaza Strip. The strike killed at least 90 people, including children, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said in August that Deif was killed in the attack, though Hamas previously claimed he survived.
April 2024
Two Iranian generals were killed in what Iran said was an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria. The deaths led Iran to launch an unprecedented attack on Israel that involved about 300 missiles and drones, most of which were intercepted.
January 2024
An Israeli drone strike in Beirut killed Saleh Arouri, a top Hamas official in exile, as Israeli troops fight the militant group in Gaza.
December 2023
Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria, was killed in a drone attack outside of Damascus. Iran blamed Israel.
2021
An underground nuclear facility in central Iran was hit with explosions and a devastating cyberattack that caused rolling blackouts. Iran accused Israel of carrying out the attack as well as several others against Iranian nuclear facilities using explosive drones in the ensuing years.
2020
In one of the most prominent assassinations targeting Iran’s nuclear program, a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran. Iran blamed Israel.
2019
An Israeli airstrike hit the home of Bahaa Abu el-Atta, a senior Islamic Jihad commander in the Gaza Strip, killing him and his wife.
2012
Ahmad Jabari, head of Hamas’ armed wing, was killed when an airstrike targets his car. His death sparked an eight-day war between Hamas and Israel.
2010
The Stuxnet computer virus, discovered in 2010, disrupted and destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges. It was widely believed to be a joint US-Israeli creation.
2010
Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas operative, was killed in a Dubai hotel room in an operation attributed to the Mossad spy agency but never acknowledged by Israel. Many of the 26 supposed assassins were caught on camera disguised as tourists.
2008
Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief, was killed when a bomb planted in his car exploded in Damascus. Mughniyeh was accused of engineering suicide bombings during Lebanon’s civil war and of planning the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed. Hezbollah blamed his killing on Israel. His son Jihad Mughniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike in 2015.
2004
Hamas’ spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, was killed in an Israeli helicopter strike while being pushed in his wheelchair. Yassin, who was paralyzed in a childhood accident, was among the founders of Hamas in 1987. His successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike less than a month later.
2002
Hamas’s second-highest military leader, Salah Shehadeh, was killed by a one-ton bomb dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City.
1997
Mossad agents tried to kill the head of Hamas at the time, Khaled Mashaal, in Amman, Jordan. Two agents entered Jordan using fake Canadian passports and poison Mashaal by placing a device near his ear. They were captured shortly afterward and Jordan’s king threatened to void a still-fresh peace accord if Mashaal died. Israel ultimately dispatched an antidote, and the Israeli agents were returned home. Mashaal remains a senior figure in Hamas.
1996
Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed the “engineer” for his mastery in building bombs for Hamas, was killed by answering a rigged phone in Gaza. His assassination triggered a series of deadly bus bombings in Israel.
1995
Islamic Jihad founder Fathi Shikaki was shot in the head in Malta in an assassination widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.
1988
Palestine Liberation Organization military chief Khalil Al-Wazir was killed in Tunisia. Better known as Abu Jihad, he had been PLO chief Yasser Arafat’s deputy. In 2012, military censors allowed an Israeli paper to reveal details of the Israeli raid for the first time.
1973
Israeli commandos shot a number of PLO leaders in their apartments in Beirut, in a nighttime raid led by Ehud Barak, who later became Israel’s top army commander and prime minister. The operation was part of a string of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian leaders that were carried out in retaliation for the killings of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
WHO chief says Israel tanks fired on Gaza aid convoy
- The “incident and the conduct of Israeli forces on the ground put the lives of our staff in danger,” he lamented
GENEVA: The World Health Organization chief on Tuesday said that Israeli tanks at the weekend had fired on an aid convoy that had been cleared to travel back from war-ravaged northern Gaza.
“Last Saturday, on the way back from a mission to the northern Gaza and after a WHO-led convoy got clearance and crossed the coast road checkpoint, the convoy encountered two Israeli tanks,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Shots were fired from the tanks near the convoy. Luckily nobody was hurt,” he said. “This is unacceptable.”
The incident came just a week after the United Nations said that a convoy carrying workers for a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza had been held at gunpoint at an Israeli military checkpoint.
During that encounter, in the context of a massive vaccination campaign after the first case of polio in 25 years was registered in the Palestinian territory, shots were fired and convoy vehicles were rammed by a bulldozer, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said last week.
The “incident and the conduct of Israeli forces on the ground put the lives of our staff in danger,” he lamented.
“It is critical that Israeli forces take measures to protect humanitarian staff and assets to facilitate their work.”
In his post, Tedros hailed the teams in Saturday’s convoy who “despite the security risk” had managed to reach Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, to deliver supplies for the emergency room.
“Supplies were also delivered to support the Palestine Red Crescent Society facilities in the north, including for the treatment of noncommunicable diseases,” he said.
“The teams also facilitated the rotation of emergency medical teams.”
The United Nations health agency chief hailed the “unwavering humanitarian workers in Gaza,” who “amid extreme danger and life-threatening conditions... continue to deliver critical aid.”
They are “serving as the last hope for the survival for two million people in desperate need,” he said in his post.
“The minimum they deserve for their service is safety. The deconfliction mechanism needs to be adhered to. Ceasefire!“
The October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 97 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,252 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
