IAF strikes Hamas command center in central Gaza’s Khadija School

The Israeli air force struck a Hamas command center embedded in the Khadija school in the Deir al Balah neighborhood of central Gaza, the IDF announced on Saturday.

The military stated that Hamas terrorists used the compound as a hiding place to plan attacks on Israeli troops and civilians.

The center was reportedly also used by the terrorists to develop and store large quantities of weapons. 

Prior to the strike, the IDF explained it took numerous steps to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians, including the use of appropriate munitions and operating on aerial surveillance and other intelligence. 

“This is a further example of the Hamas terrorist organization’s systematic violation of international law and exploitation of civilian structures and population as human shields for its attacks against the State of Israel,” the military stated.

At least 30 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on a school in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, officials from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said. The ministry also claimed over 100 were wounded.

Hamas condemned the strike, issuing a statement reading, “The heinous massacre committed by the fascist occupation army in Sayyida Khadija School in Deir al-Balah, which houses thousands of displaced people, by targeting the schoolyard and a field medical point with three bombs dropped by its warplanes, which resulted in the martyrdom of dozens of displaced people, patients and wounded, most of them children and women; is a brutal crime that confirms the detachment of this terrorist enemy from all human values, and its continued defiance of all laws of war that stipulate the protection of civilians.”

Hamas operates terrorist activities from civilian infrastructure 

Hamas’s use of human shields has been chronicled throughout the war, which started when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7 and murdered over 1200 people and kidnapped 253 more. 

In May, IDF troops operating in southern Gaza uncovered a store of weapons stored in a UNRWA school complex, which also included a mosque and a medical clinic. Under the civilian clinic was a tunnel shaft, which exploded on the operating troops and killed three soldiers.

In June, the IDF was able to name 17 terrorists killed during a strike on an UNRWA school in Nusierat, where they were using civilian infrastructure as a shield. 

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