An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people and hundreds of thousands of residents of the Rafah neighbourhood are fleeing, in one of the largest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s recently announced campaign to “divide” the Gaza Strip.
According to Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the civil defence agency, three rockets hit the Dar al-Arqam school in the Al-Tuffah area on Thursday afternoon, killing several children and injuring 100 others.
The building was being used as a shelter for Palestinians forced to flee their homes. The Israeli military said in a statement that it had taken precautions to avoid civilian casualties from the bombing of the facility, which it described as the Hamas militant group’s command centre.
Another 20 people were killed in an early morning airstrike on the Gaza suburb of Shejaiya, bringing the total number of casualties reported by the local health ministry to 97 in the past 24 hours.
The intense wave of Israeli bombardment comes amid a significant expansion of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) air and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory following Israel’s decision a fortnight ago to abandon a two-month ceasefire.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had hit more than 600 “terrorist targets” across the Gaza Strip since it resumed large-scale airstrikes on March 18. Gaza’s Health Ministry, which the UN cites in its casualty figures, says 1,163 people have been killed in bombings since the ceasefire was violated.
Process of seizing Gaza
On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the army was “seizing territory” and “dividing” Gaza. Israel has halted humanitarian aid, food and fuel shipments to the Gaza Strip for more than a month in an attempt to put pressure on Hamas.
Netanyahu did not specify how much Palestinian land Israel intends to seize in the renewed offensive, but according to Ocha, the UN humanitarian agency, the IDF have declared 64% of the territory as military buffer zones and areas “off-limits’”to civilians.
Netanyahu’s latest announcement has reignited fears of permanent displacement of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents. It is also likely to heighten fears that Israel intends to permanently control the territory.
On Thursday, local media showed footage of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the southern city of Rafah and surrounding areas as Israeli ground troops moved forward to create a security corridor recently announced by Netanyahu. But movement has been hampered by at least three Israeli strikes on the two main roads leading north.
“The Morag Route” is named after a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting that the new military zone will divide the two southern cities in a similar way to Israel’s Netzarim corridor south of Gaza City.
The Gaza war was triggered by a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that Israel says killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took another 250 prisoners. According to the Palestinian Territory’s Ministry of Health, Israel’s military retaliation campaign in Gaza has killed at least 50,357 people, most of them civilians.
Israeli strikes kill Hamas official along with his son and daughter in Lebanon
A senior Hamas official, Hassan Farhat, and his two sons were killed early Friday morning in an Israeli drone strike on a flat in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.
A Lebanese security official told media that “an Israeli drone fired two air-to-ground missiles at a flat in the al-Zahraa neighbourhood in the centre of Sidon, where Hamas leader Hassan Farhat lived. The impact started a fire in the flat, killing Farhat and his two sons.”
Civil defence personnel extinguished the fire and a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance took the bodies to hospital, the report said.
Despite the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel that began on November 27, 2024, the Israeli military has occasionally carried out strikes in Lebanon, claiming they were aimed at neutralising “threats from Hezbollah.”
Israel also maintained a military presence at five key points along the Lebanese border even after the deadline for full withdrawal expired on February 18.
