A football match interrupted by an air strike that killed 31 people; a young man carrying the remnants of the rockets after another strike killed 25; a boy wailing over two body bags crying, “They killed my father and my uncle. They died. They died. They died”.
Over the past 11 days Israel has launched a wave of air strikes against schools in Gaza, which are believed to have killed nearly 100 Palestinians. They have targeted at least eight schools in Gaza, according to Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
More than 400 schools have been destroyed since October 7, when Hamas launched its deadly attacks against Israel, and nearly 90 per cent have been damaged or destroyed. Over 95 per cent of the UNRWA schools in Gaza that have been hit were being used to shelter Palestinians, the agency said, and 539 of those sheltering were killed. “Nowhere is safe. The blatant disregard for UN premises and humanitarian law must stop,” it added.
Nour Odeh, Palestinian political analyst and and former spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, told i: “Israel has already destroyed 70 per cent of buildings in Gaza, so there are few standing targets left. Israel has shrunk the physical space of Gaza, where people are packed like sardines – so anywhere you hit, you are likely to kill displaced Palestinians.”
The number of air strikes on Gaza’s schools has become an “almost daily occurrence” in recent weeks, Mr Lazzarini said, with strikes taking place within the Israeli-designated “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military bombed the UN-run al-Razi school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing at least 25 Palestinians and wounding dozens of others. Two days earlier, the nearby UN-run Abu Oreiban school was struck, killing at least 17 people and injuring about 80. Most of the victims were women and children, according to the Palestinian civil defence.
The deadliest attack came near the entrance to Khan Yunis’s al-Awda school on 9 July, killing at least 31 people. A video showed the moment of the strike, when a group of boys playing football, watched by families, was suddenly interrupted. Footage of bloodied bodies and rubble is subsequently seen. More schools were hit in Nuseirat, as well as another in the Catholic Church-run Holy Family school in Gaza City where four people were killed.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s representative to the UN, told the body this week that Hamas members were hiding in schools run by UNRWA, adding: “Hamas has been using children for terrorism and uses schools and hospitals as military compounds.”
The Israel Defence Forces told i in relation to the attacks on al-Awda School, the UNRWA-run schools in Nuseirat and the Abu Oreiban school that they “struck terrorists”, and added that they were “looking into the reports that civilians were harmed”. It did not address the attacks on Holy Family school or al-Razi school. It has yet to provide evidence of Hamas using schools as military bases.
Bill Van Esveld, acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch, told i: “We haven’t documented the latest attacks ourselves, but Israel got away with unlawful attacks on education in Palestine for years with barely a slap on the wrist.
“Israel was finally listed by the UN Secretary General for grave violations against children in 2023, including attacks on schools. Yet since then, we and others have documented blatantly unlawful Israeli attacks that killed large numbers of civilians, including those displaced by unlawful evacuation orders.”
The recent escalation in attacks on Gaza comes amid reports that Hamas is under increasing pressure to agree to a three-phase ceasefire and hostage return deal put forward by the US at the end of May.
William Burns, the CIA director, told a closed-door conference at the weekend that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, was facing blame from within the group for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza as Israel continues its offensive. According to Mr Burns, pressure has grown in the past two weeks from Sinwar’s senior military commanders who want to agree a truce.
Mr Burns said there was a “fragile possibility” that this could lead to an end to the war. The reported remarks align with recent reports that US intelligence believes Hamas has been seriously weakened by Israel’s military offensive.
Ms Odeh claimed that the recent escalation could be an attempt by the Israeli Prime Minister to “tank” the peace talks. She said: “[Benjamin] Netanyahu has no interested in a ceasefire to end the war. If anything the war has empowered him: the Israeli Knesset goes into recess with no threat of government collapsing, so he wants to drag out the war – and to do this they must keep committing acts of war – which means attacking schools in Gaza where Palestinians are sheltering.”
However, other analysts have suggested that Israel may be intensifying its attacks to apply further pressure to Hamas to agree to its demands and make further concessions.
“Israel has always ratcheted up the intensity of attacks on their opponents in the lead-up to ceasefires,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow with Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think-tank, told Al Jazeera. “They see it as a means of increasing pressure on the other side, in this case Hamas, to accede to their demands and make further concessions.”
Uriel Abulof, an associate professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, told i: “The longer Gaza is under the control of the Israel Defence Forces, the more intelligence the military can likely gather from the Palestinian population.
“The dire straits of the Palestinians, where they are in need of money or food – they may be more willing to collaborate with Israeli security in exchange for information. Whether this intelligence is accurate? It is hard to say.
“Israel is also more prepared to engage in more collateral damage since 7 October, and as the ground operation is less intense currently, Israel may use more air strikes – which are less specifically targeted and lead to more collateral damage.”
Palestinian political activist Ameer Makhoul claimed that Israel’s bombing of schools was “part of a systematic approach to make life impossible in Gaza”. Mr Makhoul, a former political prisoner sentenced to nine years by Israel on charges of spying for Hezbollah, which he denies, told i: “The bombing of schools is part of a systematic approach to make life impossible in Gaza. They want to ‘clean up’ this area from Palestinians, for any future possibility to live after the war and make it impossible to build back. It’s a war against the UN, a war on refugees, a war on children – with the aim to eliminate the very existence of Palestine and the possibility of any future.”
Since 7 October, at least 14,500 of Gaza’s 1.1 million children have been killed, according to Save the Children. Many more remain missing and are presumed to be buried under rubble. Unicef estimates that at least 17,000 children, or 1 per cent of Gaza’s population, now consists of unaccompanied children, separated from their immediate relatives since the beginning of the conflict. More than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed since the conflict began, most of them women and children, according to Gaza health officials.
The education system in the Strip has been nearly destroyed, with 800,000 students deprived of their right to education in Gaza since October, while 39,000 secondary schoolchildren are unable to sit their secondary school exams, according to the Hamas-run government media office.
Meanwhile, all 12 of Gaza’s higher education institutions have been destroyed or damaged, and 350 teachers and academics have been killed since 7 October, according to Palestinian official data.
Refaat Alareer, an academic and poet at the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City, told i in October that Israel was targeting schools, and that his university had been “completely destroyed”. “This is a deliberate attempt to exterminate and displace Palestinians,” he added. Two months later he was killed in an Israeli air strike.
A June report by the UN Human Rights Council found that Israel’s continuous attacks on civilian infrastructure, including schools, appears to be violations of international law.
Mr Lazzarini wrote: “Schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery.”
Mr Van Esveld said: “Only concerted international pressure will end unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza, and that means supporting the ICC [International Criminal Court] and ICJ [International Court of Justice] investigations, starving Israel’s military of the weapons it has used with such devastating abandon, and sanctioning officials responsible for unlawful attacks.”