Every place in Gaza – including schools – is a target

Photo source: Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif – CC BY 4.0

It is almost as if the Israeli army is trying to gather as many Palestinians as possible in one place and then kill them all. Ahmed Abed and his family fled the Dalal al-Maghribi school in early August after being displaced by an Israeli airstrike. That airstrike killed 15 Palestinians who had sought refuge there after Israel bombed their homes in the Ash Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City. The family arrived at al-Taba’een school, a private school with an attached mosque that provided shelter to 2,500 people. Since the Israelis began their latest bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians have sought refuge in private schools and United Nations (UN) schools. The UN reports that in the Gaza Strip, 190 of their facilities, most of them schools, were damaged by the Israeli attacks. There are few places of refuge left in Gaza. These schools – whether private or UN schools – are the only places that were considered relatively safe.

On August 10, at 4:30 a.m., Israeli jets flew over Gaza and dropped American GBU-39 250-pound bombs on the al-Taba’een school and mosque. At that time, a large number of residents were queuing outside the mosque to Fajr or morning prayers. The bombs hit people near the mosque, killing at least 100 Palestinians. It is a grotesque massacre that took place at the very moment when the United States decided to rearm Israel with such weapons. Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, wrote that the United States’ arms sales to Israel on the day of this bombing represented “Pavlovian conditioning for a savage army.”

The United States has consistently armed Israel throughout this genocidal war, despite occasional statements about arms restraint. Since 1948, the United States has supplied Israel with $130 billion worth of weapons. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (second was Germany, which supplied 20 percent of Israel’s arms imports). U.S. arms sales were in deliberately small quantities, under $25 million per sale, so that they would not require U.S. Congressional scrutiny and thus public debate. From October 2023 to March, the U.S. approved 100 of these small sales, totaling over $1 billion worth of arms sales, including the GBU-39. It is important to note that the U.S.-made bomb was likely loaded onto an Israeli fighter plane by a U.S. technician seconded to Israeli bases.

Schools are increasingly being targeted

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense Unit, said medics who arrived at the scene at al-Taba’een school – many of them veterans of this kind of violence – were stunned by what they found. “The school grounds are littered with bodies and body parts,” he said. “It is very difficult for medics to identify a whole body. Here is an arm, there is a leg. The bodies are torn to pieces. The medical teams are helpless in the face of this horrific sight.” At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombings since last October and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the run-up to the attack on al-Taba’een school, Israeli forces have escalated their bombing of schools in Gaza that serve as emergency shelters. In July, the Israeli military attacked 17 schools in Gaza, killing at least 163 Palestinians. During the week before August 10, Israel attacked the Khadija and Ahmad al-Kurd schools in Deir al-Balah, killing 30 Palestinians (July 27), the Dalal Moghrabi school in Ash Shujaiyeh, killing 15 Palestinians (August 1), the Hamama and Huda schools in Sheikh Radwan, killing 16 Palestinians (August 3), the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools in al-Nassr, killing 25 Palestinians (August 4), and the al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools, killing 17 Palestinians (August 8).

This series of attacks on schools occurred before the August 10 bombing, showing that there is a pattern of attacks on civilians seeking shelter in schools. The al-Taba’een massacre is Israel’s 21st attack on a school used as a shelter since July 4. Ahmed Abed lost his brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Arair, in the al-Taba’een massacre. “There is no other place to go,” he said. “Every place in Gaza is a target.”

Israeli denials

While Israel acknowledged bombing these schools, it denied that any civilians were killed. In fact, Israel no longer refers to these sites, such as al-Taba’een and Dalal Moghrabi, as schools, but as “military installations.” The Israeli military said it killed at least 20 “terrorists” after claiming to have hit an “‘active’ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room in a mosque.” Israeli authorities released the names of at least 19 people it said were senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives.

The EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, an independent organization based in Switzerland, investigated the Israeli military’s claims and concluded that they lack factual basis. The Monitor’s staff visited the school, interviewed the survivors, and checked the Israeli-controlled civil registry for names. The team’s “preliminary investigation found that the Israeli army had included names of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids in its list – some of whom were killed in previous raids.” The three people who were killed earlier but whose names appeared in the Israeli lists include Ahmed Ihab al-Jaabari (killed on December 5, 2023), Youssef al-Wadiyya (killed on August 8, 2024), and Montaser Daher (killed on August 9, 2024). The Israeli list also included three elderly civilians with no ties to any militant group, including Abdul Aziz Misbah al-Kafarna (a school principal) and Yousef Kahlout (an Arabic teacher and deputy mayor of Beit Hanoun). The list also includes six civilians, “some of whom were even Hamas opponents.”

It is notable that even in their own statements, Israeli officials seem uncertain about their claims. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israeli military said that “various intelligence indications” showed that there was a “high probability” that Ashraf Juda, a commander of Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, was at the al-Taba’een school. But the Israelis could not confirm this. So the Israelis killed 100 civilians, even though they were not sure whether their target was at the facility at the time.

The Israeli army has developed a pattern for its genocidal campaign. First, it bombs residential areas and sends the frightened people to shelters such as schools and hospitals. Then, it issues blanket evacuation orders for an entire area, forcing the people in these shelters to live in fear, as many of them do not have the means to leave and go elsewhere (in fact, “there is nowhere else to go,” said Ahmed Abed). After these evacuation orders are issued, Israel then bombs the sheltered shelters, including hospitals and schools, arguing that they are military targets. This pattern has been implemented in Gaza City and other parts of Gaza.

Now Israel has issued mandatory evacuation orders for the people of Khan Younis, a town in central Gaza. In parallel, Israeli forces have begun air and artillery strikes on the eastern edge of Khan Younis. We will now see similar attacks on schools and hospitals that serve as places of refuge for desperate people in central Gaza, with each building being considered a legitimate target by the Israelis.

This article was created by Globetrotter.