Six workers for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees were killed Wednesday when two airstrikes hit a school and its surroundings in a central Gaza refugee camp, the agency said, adding that it was the “highest death toll among our staff in a single incident.” The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas militants at the Nuseirat camp.
In a statement Thursday, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, said those killed in the strikes on the camp included the shelter’s manager. About 12,000 displaced people are sheltering at the school, which has been hit five times since the war began, the agency said. “No one is safe in Gaza,” UNRWA said in the statement. “No one is spared.”
Dozens of Palestinians were killed Wednesday in strikes across central and southern Gaza, and five were killed in a strike in Tubas in the West Bank, according to Palestinian officials and health workers. A Gaza civil defense force spokesman said that 14 Palestinians, including one child, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the al-Jaouni school in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
The Israel Defense Forces said that its air force had conducted a “precise strike” on a “Hamas command and control center” in the camp.
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini condemned the “senseless killing, day after day” in Gaza in a social media statement, adding that 220 of the agency’s staff had been killed since Oct. 7. “The longer impunity prevails, the more international humanitarian law & the Geneva conventions will become irrelevant,” he wrote.
António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said in a social media post on the killing of the six workers that “what’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable.”
The IDF did not immediately provide comment in response to the UNRWA statement.
Here’s what else to know
Hamas is ready to implement the cease-fire and hostage release proposal in the form announced by President Joe Biden in May, it said Wednesday in a social media statement. Complicating the deal are new requirements from Israel, including its insistence that its military will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, as well as Hamas’s recent killing of six hostages.
Witness statements and video challenge the Israeli narrative on how American citizen Aysenur Eygi was killed, a Washington Post investigation found. The IDF said Eygi was shot “unintentionally” during a “violent riot,” but The Post’s analysis shows clashes had subsided and protesters had retreated. Biden said in a Wednesday statement that he was “outraged and deeply saddened” by the death, adding that “the shooting that led to her death is totally unacceptable.”
The World Health Organization and its partners carried out the largest medical evacuation from Gaza since October — of 45 children and 52 adults who are sick or severely injured, along with 155 companions — on Wednesday, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media.
The Islamist party that has tried to end Jordan’s peace agreement with Israel made significant gains in parliamentary elections, Jordanian media reported Wednesday. The Islamic Action Front, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, won 31 of 138 lower house seats, more than any other party, Jordan’s electoral commission announced. But the party will be curtailed by its minority position and the U.S. ally’s system of government, in which its king has significant power.
At least 41,084 people have been killed and 95,029 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, including more than 300 soldiers, and says 342 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operation in Gaza.
Kareem Fahim contributed to this report.
