DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli airstrikes hit a school being used by displaced Palestinians in central Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 30 people including several children, as the country’s negotiators prepared to meet international mediators to discuss a proposed cease-fire.
At least seven children and seven women were among the dead taken from the girls' school in Deir al-Balah to Al Aqsa Hospital. Israel's military said it targeted a Hamas command center used to direct attacks against Israeli troops and develop and store "large quantities of weapons.” Hamas in a statement called the military’s claim false.
Civil defense workers in Gaza said thousands had been sheltering in the school, which also contained a medical site.
Associated Press journalists saw a dead toddler in an ambulance and bodies covered with blankets. Inside the school, shattered walls gaped and classrooms were in ruins. People searched for victims in rubble strewn with pillows and other signs of habitation.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 12 people were killed in other strikes on Saturday.
Officials from the U.S., Egypt, Qatar and Israel are scheduled to meet in Italy on Sunday to discuss ongoing cease-fire negotiations. CIA Director Bill Burns is expected to meet Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani, Mossad director David Barnea and Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel, according to officials from the U.S. and Egypt who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the plans.
U.S. officials on Friday said Israel and Hamas agree on the basic framework of the three-phase deal under consideration. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to the U.S. Congress vowed to press ahead with the war until Israel achieves “total victory.”
After the Israeli strike on the school, Palestinian officials condemned the speech. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said in a statement that Netanyahu's reception from supporters in the U.S. constituted a “green light” to continue Israel's offensive.
“Every time the occupation bombs a school that shelters displaced persons, we see only some condemnations and denunciations that will not force the occupation to stop its bloody aggression,” he said.
New evacuation order for part of humanitarian zone
Israel's military ordered a new evacuation of part of a designated humanitarian zone in Gaza ahead of a planned strike on Khan Younis on Saturday. The order was in response to rocket fire that Israel said came from the area.
The military said it planned an operation against Hamas militants in the city, including parts of Muwasi, the crowded tent camp in an area where Israel has told thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge.
It’s the second evacuation order issued in a week that has included striking part of the humanitarian zone, a 60-square-kilometer (roughly 20-square-mile) area blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities and have limited access to aid. Israel expanded the zone in May to take in people fleeing the southernmost city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population at the time had crowded.
Gaza Health Ministry officials said the evacuation orders had forced at least three health centers to stop providing care and compounded issues such as piled-up waste and shortages of supplies.
According to Israeli estimates, about 1.8 million Palestinians shelter in the zone after being uprooted multiple times during Israel’s punishing air and ground campaign. In November, the military said the area could still be struck and that it was “not a safe zone, but it is a safer place than any other” in Gaza.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said it was difficult to know how many people would be affected by the evacuation order.
“These are forced displacement orders," said Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications. "What happens is when people have these orders, they have very little time to move.”
Farther north, Palestinians mourned seven killed by Israeli airstrikes overnight on Zawaida, in central Gaza. Parents and their two children and a mother and her two children were wrapped in white burial shrouds as friends and neighbors wept.
Al Aqsa Hospital confirmed the count and AP journalists saw the bodies.
A death in the West Bank
In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said a 17-year-old was killed and nine other people wounded after an Israeli drone strike in Balata camp in Nablus. The Israeli military said one of its aircraft attacked from the air as part of its activity in Nablus.
The war in Gaza has killed more than 39,200 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count. The U.N. estimated in February that some 17,000 children in the territory are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.
The war began with an assault by Hamas militants on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. About 115 are still in Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead, according to Israeli authorities.
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