Israel kills more Palestinians in school shelters

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented a serious escalation in Israel’s systematic policy of targeting schools that have become shelters for forcibly displaced civilians in the Gaza Strip. The attacks take place without prior warning, killing and wounding hundreds, as part of the ongoing genocide since 7 October.

The rights group reported that its field team documented Israeli aircraft bombing the Halima Al-Sadia School at midnight on Saturday. The school shelters hundreds of forcibly displaced people in Jabalia Al-Nazla, in the north of the Gaza Strip. Four people were killed, and an undisclosed number were wounded.

Israeli aircraft also bombed the Amr Ibn Al-Aas School, which also shelters displaced people to the north of Gaza City, on Saturday afternoon. There too, four Palestinians were killed, one of whom was a child.

The Israeli army, it seems, is deliberately destroying the remaining shelters in Gaza, with the aim of creating an environment that forces civilians to be forcibly displaced towards the centre and south of the enclave. Indeed, since the beginning of August, the Israeli occupation army has bombed 16 schools used as shelters in the Gaza Strip, 15 of them north of Wadi Gaza. At least 217 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds have been wounded, many of them women and children.

Euro-Med added that the Israeli army has also escalated the targeting of civilians in the past week in the Gaza Strip and North Gaza Governorates. Homes, gatherings and essential food stalls have been bombed, as well as shelters and their surroundings.

The organisation pointed out that there is no justification for targeting and destroying schools over the heads of the displaced. Doing so is a flagrant violation of the principles of distinction, military necessity, proportionality and the need to take necessary precautions. The Israeli army, it said, tries to justify these attacks by claiming to be attacking military targets, but no evidence proving the validity of these claims is ever provided.

Such attacks, said Euro-Med, are part of the occupation state’s genocide of the Palestinians which is aimed at getting rid of as many local people as possible from the Gaza Strip either by killing or forcibly displacing them. The human rights organisation added that the “Generals’ Plan” revealed by Yedioth Ahronoth, provides the occupation army with options to expel and displace the remaining Palestinians in the northern Gaza Valley, and that this is further evidence of Israel’s intention to empty Gaza of its residents.

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