A day after Israeli forces bombed a UN school complex in central Gaza that had become a shelter for displaced Palestinians, some of the facts remain unclear or disputed.
Israel said it attacked three classrooms used by between 20 and 30 Palestinian militants, including some who took part in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, and that it was not aware of any civilian casualties. Gaza health authorities said that among the dozens of people killed, many were children and women. Here’s what we know and what we don’t know.
What was bombed?
The multi-story building was one of several that made up UNRWA’s Nuseirat Boys’ Preparatory School. It was one of many schools in Gaza run by the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
Like all schools in the territory, it ceased operating as a school in October, after Hamas led an attack on Israel and Israel began its retaliatory bombing campaign. And like many of them, it was filled with people who, displaced by the war from their homes elsewhere in Gaza, sought refuge in schools, hospitals and other institutions they hoped would be less likely to be bombed.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees, said 6,000 people had been living at the school. About three-quarters of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million residents have fled their homes, many of them multiple times.
The Israeli military has referred to the Nuseirat school as a militant base, saying that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters used three of its classrooms to plan and carry out operations against Israel.
How many died in Nuseirat and who were they?
The Israeli military on Friday released the names of eight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters it said were killed in the attack, adding to a list released Thursday and bringing the total number to 17.
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said Thursday that he was “not aware of any civilian casualties” as a result of the attack. The military did not respond when asked if that was still the case Friday.
But witnesses, medical staff and Gaza officials said dozens of civilians were killed, many of them children or women.
A Gaza Health Ministry official said Thursday that at least 41 people were killed, and another said 46. Yasser Khattab, an official who supervises the morgue at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al Balah, said where many of the bodies were taken, he said that there were 46 dead, including 18 children and nine women. But his statements could not be independently confirmed.
Khattab said the hospital had a well-practiced system for documenting and identifying bodies and body parts. “We look for any marker that will help us identify the person,” he said.
A New York Times journalist who went to the hospital after the attack saw it packed with corpses, the living and their relatives, as well as doctors trying to make their way through the mass of people. Witnesses described how the children’s remains were pulled from the rubble of the school.
Karin Huster, a medical coordinator for the aid group Doctors Without Borders who has been working at the hospital, said most of the patients she had seen in recent days were women and children.
How careful was Israel’s action?
The bombing of Nuseirat exemplifies the terrible calculation of the war that has already lasted eight months. Hamas, which operates in densely populated neighborhoods, is accused of cynically using Palestinians and civilian infrastructure as shields. By targeting Hamas, Israel regularly kills civilians and is accused (including by its allies) of using excessive and indiscriminate force.
The Israeli military maintains that the airstrike was planned and carried out with care and precision, targeting only the three school classrooms used by the militants. Both there and at a camp in Rafah, where an Israeli bombing and subsequent fire killed 45 people in late May, according to Gaza officials, Israel used U.S.-made GBU-39 bombs with about 37 pounds of explosive, which the army are the smallest that carry their fighter planes.
The military said that between 20 and 30 militants had used the school as a base, including some who took part in the October 7 assault. He said he had kept them under surveillance for three days before attacking at the time that would cause the least civilian casualties.
International laws of war prohibit the use of sites such as hospitals, schools and places of worship for military purposes. Those laws also prohibit military forces from attacking such sites, with a limited exception if the enemy is using them.
Israel says it operates within the limits of that exception, because Hamas routinely operates inside those buildings and in the tunnels beneath them, making civilian casualties inevitable.
“We are seeing that Hamas still exists and that it still has capabilities above and below ground,” Colonel Lerner said Thursday.
In recent months, Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to places like Nuseirat, where they had previously taken control, and then moved on, as Hamas fighters reappear there. Israeli officials have said this demonstrates the need to carry out attacks like Thursday’s.
How far an attacking force can go with such operations, legal experts say, differs on a case-by-case basis depending on how it attempts to safeguard civilians and distinguish them from combatants, and how proportional the attack is to the military advantage gained. In other words, it can be very shady in specific cases.
Richard Perez Pena and Efrat Livni contributed reports.