Four Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, hospitals said on Sunday, as Israel hit another former school in the war-torn coastal territory.
According to al-Awda hospital, three of the victims died in the shelling of a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
A fourth Palestinian was killed in an attack in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza said. An Israeli military spokesman said they were investigating the reports.
According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, 24 people were killed in the Mediterranean coastal strip within a day.
More than 41,200 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, the ministry said. The number does not distinguish between militants and civilians and is difficult to verify.
Israel has come under severe international criticism due to the high number of civilian casualties, the catastrophic health situation in the Gaza Strip and the heavy destruction of the territory.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday that during operations and fighting with militant Palestinians in Rafah in southern Gaza in the last few days, more than 100 terrorists had been killed, while rocket launchers, weapons caches and terrorist infrastructure had been found and destroyed.
The claims could not be independently verified.
IDF hits another former school
The IDF also said it targeted a command post of the Palestinian militant group Hamas inside a former school in northern Gaza, days after Palestinian medics said several people were killed in a similar attack.
In a statement, the military said that it carried out a strike on a “compound that previously served as the Raazi El Shua School in Beit Hanoun.”
There were no reports of casualties.
The building was “used by Hamas terrorists as an operational hideout” and “a place to plan and carry out rocket and missile attacks” on Israel, the IDF said.
The statement said measures were taken to minimize the danger to civilians. Witnesses reported that Israeli forces first launched a single rocket as a warning for civilians to flee.
On Wednesday, 18 people were reportedly killed in an attack on a former school building in Nuseirat, including six United Nations staff.
The IDF gave the names of nine suspected Hamas terrorists killed in the attack, including three employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The allegations could not be independently verified.
Hostages killed in Israeli airstrike
Also on Sunday, an investigation found that three Israeli hostages whose bodies were recovered in Gaza last year were likely killed by an Israeli airstrike.
The IDF said in a statement that the three hostages – two soldiers and a young woman with French citizenship who was captured at the Nova music festival – probably died as a result of an airstrike on November 10, 2023 that targeted Hamas commander Ahmed Ghandour.
The findings, based on detailed analysis of the strike and pathological reports, were a “high-probability assessment,” the statement said, although the IDF stated that it could not “definitively determine the circumstances of their deaths.”
The hostages were being held in a “tunnel complex from which Ghandour operated,” the statement said. It added that Israeli forces did not know the hostages were likely in the compound when they launched the strike.
Their bodies were recovered from the tunnel on December 14 after the IDF received “precise intelligence” on their location.
“The IDF shares in the grief of the families over the devastating loss,” the statement added.
Relatives of the 250 hostages taken to Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas repeatedly warned Israeli leaders of the consequences of their retaliation.
Around 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza, although it is unclear how many remain alive after almost one year in captivity.
