"Is Israel The World's Foremost Terror State?
Israeli General's Son Thinks So"
Israeli General's Son Thinks So"
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BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — A series of explosions at a school run by the United Nations sheltering hundreds of Palestinians who had fled their homes for safety from Israeli military assaults killed at least 16 people on Thursday afternoon and wounded many more. The cause was not immediately clear.
Many Palestinians initially presumed it was an Israeli strike that hit the shelter in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, but the Israeli military suggested soon afterward that errant Palestinian-fired munitions might have been the source. The local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which runs the school, said he could not be sure.
Israeli officials denied having intentionally targeted the school and said they had warned the United Nations three days earlier that the school should be evacuated because the surrounding area was a combat zone.
The civilians who had taken refuge in the school had been gathering in the courtyard preparing to flee just when it was hit multiple times, according to witnesses.
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The shelling of the school, on the 17th day of an increasingly bloody conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, came just as efforts led by Secretary of State John Kerry to establish a cease-fire were intensifying.
Whoever was responsible for the school casualties, it was the kind of event that could increase diplomatic pressure on the combatants to stop the fighting, which has left more than 750 Palestinians dead from Israeli attacks, most of them civilians. Thirty-two soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side also been killed.
“We are deeply saddened and concerned about the tragic incident at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency school and about the rising civilian death toll in Gaza,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This also underscores the need to end the violence and to achieve a sustainable cease-fire and enduring resolution to the crisis in Gaza as soon as possible.”
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, who was in the region this week to try to advance cease-fire efforts and met with Mr. Kerry on Wednesday, said in a statement that he was “appalled” by the school attack.
“Many have been killed — including women and children, as well as U.N. staff,” he said. “Circumstances are still unclear. I strongly condemn this act.” He said that throughout the day, United Nations staff had been attempting to arrange a pause in the hostilities so that civilians could be evacuated.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said at least 16 people had been killed and “a large number” wounded at the Beit Hanoun school.
A senior Israeli military official, Brig. Gen. Michael Edelstein, the commander of the Gaza division, told reporters in a telephone briefing that he did not yet know what had happened. “If we made a mistake, we will say it,” he said.
He said Israel was not acting intentionally against any United Nations infrastructure in Gaza. “We would never bomb such a place,” he said.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said that troops had not targeted the school but that fighting was raging nearby. He said several rockets aimed at Israel had fallen short and landed in the area around the same time.
“Indeed, there was combat there, and we have to determine whether it has anything to do with us,” Colonel Lerner said. “We have decisive information that several projectiles launched from within Gaza struck in Beit Hanoun between 2 o’clock and 4:15.”
Colonel Lerner said the military had “appealed” to the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday to evacuate the school because of what he called “terrorist activities there and because of our activities in the area.” He said word came Thursday afternoon that the aid organizations would move people. Then, 15 minutes later, the school was hit.
“They, unfortunately, did not comply three days ago,” Colonel Lerner said. “We don’t strike schools. We don’t strike U.N. facilities. We do not target the United Nations.”
Jacques de Maio, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation for Israel and the Occupied Territories, the only humanitarian agency currently on the ground in Beit Hanoun, said by telephone that Beit Hanoun represented “a kind of conundrum where two parties are fighting, where you have civilians and military targets that are simply too close to each other.” That did not exonerate either side, he said.
A United Nations relief official told reporters in New York on Wednesday that at least 72 United Nations schools, hospitals and offices have been damaged in the latest fighting, even though they are visibly marked.
“Each and every one of their GPS references have been provided to the Israeli military,” said the official, John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Beit Hanoun school was the third one serving as a shelter to be hit during the current conflict. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which essentially acts as a government for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, said that more than 140,000 residents of Gaza were now staying in 83 schools where it has set up shelters.
Robert Turner, the director of Gaza operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, commonly known by its initials U.N.R.W.A., said he had few details about the strike in Beit Hanoun, because when he went to investigate, “we got a hostile reception.”
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Turner said, a school sheltering 2,000 people in Deir el Balah, in central Gaza, was struck in what was believed to be a drone attack. On Tuesday, a boy was injured by an artillery shell at a school in the Mughazi refugee camp. When United Nations workers went in to investigate — after being told by the Israeli authorities that they had a two-hour window in which it would be safe to operate — there was more shelling, Mr. Turner said, though no one was wounded.
“We’re concerned that these messages are either not being passed, or if they are being passed they are not being implemented as we would like,” he said of coordination between the Israelis charged with civilian protection and the military. “We’re not questioning the good will and hard work of the people” working with the United Nations, he added, “but we’re concerned about coordination and translation into action on the ground.”
Witnesses to the Beit Hanoun school attack said that they had gathered in the courtyard and were waiting to be evacuated to a safer area when explosives rained down.
GRAPHIC
The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day
The daily tally of rocket attacks, airstrikes and deaths in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Eight of the dead and about 80 wounded were brought to the Kamal Odwan Hospital, the nearest facility, where rooms and hallways were packed with wounded patients and their relatives.
Many said they had fled with their families from homes in the areas days before because of Israeli shelling and that the situation in the school had been getting worse as food and water became scarce.
They also said that on Thursday they had been instructed to gather in the school’s courtyard because the Red Cross was sending buses to take them to another school in a relatively safer part of Gaza.
It was early afternoon, after they had gathered, that the strikes came.
“We went to the school to be safe and then they hit the school,” said Mohammed Shinbary, kneeling on the hospital floor and cradling his wounded daughter, Mahasin, 7.
Everyone interviewed said that there had been no fighting in the immediate vicinity although they had heard shelling. All said there had been no Hamas fighters nearby but that they wanted to be moved elsewhere because they were running low on food and water.
Amina Nassir stood over a single gurney holding two of her daughters: Fatima, 13, had lost a chunk of flesh from her leg and Aya, 12, had a broken shoulder and had shrapnel wounds on both legs.
Ms. Nassir said she and her family had come to the school eight days before when shelling had begun near their home. Many other families had come too, packing into the classrooms.
Survivors differed on who had told them to prepare for evacuation, with some saying it was the Red Cross and others saying it was a local government official.
But all said it was after they had gathered that the strikes happened. Most said there were at least four strikes, though they were unclear what kind of explosives hit the school.
Many appeared shocked that the attack had occurred inside the school grounds, a place they assumed would be spared.
“I don’t know where we can go now,” Ms. Nassir said. “We can’t go home and even the schools are unsafe.”
Another survivor of the attack, Nidal Shayboub, 20, said he and 27 members of his extended family had been staying at the school because of shelling near their homes.
Mr. Shayboub, his pants bloody from a shrapnel wound in his buttocks, said a friend had told him that four of his relatives had been killed: Mr. Shayboub’s mother, brother, and two aunts.
He and others said that militants had not fired from the school at Israeli forces. They suspected, however, that Israeli troops had seen a hole the residents punched through a school wall in order to gain access to a neighbor’s water supply, and might have mistaken it for a sign of fighting.
Israeli officials have said schools are among the places where militants store and launch rockets. Twice during this conflict rockets have been discovered at vacant U.N.R.W.A. schools. Some Israelis have complained that agency personnel turned the rockets over to the security services affiliated with Hamas. Mr. Turner acknowledged that they had given the rockets to the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry, but said there had been no one else to call.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said earlier Thursday that more than 40 people had been killed in fighting elsewhere in Gaza on Thursday.
The Israeli military said that two rocket barrages were fired from Gaza in the morning and about five were intercepted over the Tel Aviv area by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system. Some shrapnel fell in Tel Aviv but there were no reports of serious injuries.
During a visit to Israel, the new British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, laid the blame on Hamas for the conflict by “firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli towns and cities indiscriminately and in breach of international humanitarian law.”
But in a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Hammond also said Britain was “gravely concerned by the ongoing heavy level of casualties” and called for a quick agreement on a cease-fire.
Mr. Netanyahu said: “The terrorists are firing rockets from schools, from mosques, from hospitals, from heavily civilian populations and we have to try and are doing our best to minimize civilian casualties. But we cannot give our attackers immunity or impunity.”
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