Israeli strike kills at least 28 Palestinians at school in central Gaza, Red Crescent says

An Israeli airstrike killed at least 28 people and wounded dozens more sheltering at a school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on Thursday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.

The attack on the Rafidah school injured at least 54 Palestinians, according to the Red Crescent. Hospital officials have confirmed the death toll.

The Israeli military said it struck “terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center” at the school compound, saying “numerous steps” were taken to protect civilians. CNN cannot independently verify the claim.

CNN footage showed children being carried into ambulances, their faces covered with blood, and many of them screaming and crying. One girl lay on the hospital floor, wearing only underpants, shaking and covered in blood, with severe burns on her body.

“Am I going to die?” the girl asked medical workers at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. “What happened?”

The strike tore down the walls of the school, covering its rooms with blackened debris. Responders and survivors dug through the wreckage trying to recover bodies.

Ayman Abou Khousa, a displaced Palestinian who was sheltering at the school, said the attack came “by surprise,” and he is now still looking for his relatives under the rubble.

“We are dying every day,” he told CNN. “The world has sold us out… every day you (journalists) come here and film us. You’ve been filming us for a year,” Khousa said, adding that Gazans are still forced to dig for their dead with their bare hands.

Another man working to recover bodies said that survivors are looking for their relatives “in pieces,” as the attack scattered their remains. Footage from the site showed some of those killed being moved in pieces, with limbs gathered in bedsheets and blankets by survivors.

“Why are they hitting the school? It is all displaced people, mostly women,” Iftekhar Hammouda, another woman who was sheltering at the school, said, adding that “there is no Hamas” there.

“Where can people go? Where do they flee? They hit us at our homes, at our tents, on the streets and at the schools,” Hammouda added.

Thursday’s strike is the latest to hit a school in Gaza. Last month, an Israeli strike on a school compound near Gaza city, killed at least 22 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian officials. Israel said it targeted Hamas fighters sheltering there.

In August, local officials said that more than 90 people were killed in an Israeli strike on a school and mosque in Al-Tabi’in compound in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City, where displaced people were sheltering. Israel confirmed it carried out the strike, saying it had targeted a Hamas command post and killed several fighters.

Israel has renewed its military operation in some parts of Gaza, saying it is targeting attempts by Hamas to regroup, and has ordered mass evacuations of multiple neighborhoods across the enclave.

The latest strike comes as Gaza’s health ministry reported more than 42,000 people killed in the besieged territory since the war began a year ago following the Hamas attacks of October 7, and as Israel presses on with a ground incursion into Lebanon while weighing an attack on Iran.

CNN’s Dana Karni in Tel Aviv and Ibrahim Dahman contributed reporting.