World outraged over Israel’s genocide in Gaza school
EU: No justification for such massacres
World reacted to the Israeli onslaught on a school shelter in Gaza that claimed more than 100 Palestinian lives early on Saturday, with a UN-appointed rights expert saying Israel is committing “genocide” in its Gaza war.
“Israel is geocoding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one safe zone at the time,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said on social media platform X.
Israel was carrying out such strikes against Palestinians using “US and European weapons,” Albanese said. “May the Palestinians forgive us for our collective inability to protect them.”
The Israeli airstrike on al-Tabi’in school in the al-Daraj neighborhood east of Gaza City, which housed displaced families, killed over 100 people, the Hamas-run Gaza government said on Saturday.
‘Systematic attacks’
This was the latest in what the UN human rights office called “systematic attacks on schools” by Israel, with at least 21 since July 4, leaving hundreds dead, including women and children.
“For many, schools are the last resort to find some shelter and possible access to food and water,” it said shortly after Saturday’s attack.
Video from the site showed body parts scattered on the ground and more bodies being carried away and covered in blankets on the floor. Empty food tins lay in a puddle of blood and burnt mattresses and a child’s doll lay among the debris.
Fadel Naeem, director of the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, told The Associated Press that the facility received 70 bodies along with the body parts of at least 10 others.
The government media office in Gaza said in a statement that the complex was attacked when people sheltering there were performing dawn prayers.
Around 350 families had been sheltering at the compound, Palestinian Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said - some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from their homes by Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. The Israeli occupation army confirmed the attack in a statement and claimed that the school “served as a hideout for Hamas commanders.”
‘Horrified’ by strike
EU’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell on Saturday expressed horror at the deadly strike by Israel, saying, “Horrified by images from a sheltering school in Gaza hit by an Israeli strike, with reportedly dozens of Palestinian victims. At least 10 schools were targeted in the last weeks. There’s no justification for these massacres.”
UK ‘appalled’
Foreign Minister David Lammy said that Britain was “appalled” at Israel’s deadly air strike on a school in Gaza and called for “an immediate ceasefire.”
“Appalled by the Israeli Military strike on al-Tabeen school and the tragic loss of life,” Lammy wrote on X, adding, “We need an immediate ceasefire to protect civilians, free all hostages, and end restrictions on aid.”
‘Heinous’ bombing
Iran condemned Israel’s “brutal massacre of women, children and the elderly.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani said Israel’s “heinous attack on the Palestinian refugees …, once again proved that the apartheid regime does not respect any of the rules and regulations of international law as well as moral and human principles.”
Qatar, a mediator in the Israeli war in Gaza, demanded an urgent probe after the strike.
Resistance groups in the region strongly condemned the Israeli bombing, with Hamas calling it “a horrific crime that marks a dangerous escalation in the unprecedented series of crimes and massacres in the history of wars, perpetrated in the Gaza Strip by the new Nazis.”
In an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic, the deputy chief of the Palestinian resistance movement, Khalil al-Hayya, called on the UN Security Council to hold an emergency meeting to stop the regime’s massacres of defenseless Palestinians.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement said the bombing is “a full-fledged war crime.”
Turkey denounced the “new crime against humanity,” according to a foreign ministry statement.
“Israel has committed a new crime against humanity by massacring more than a hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a school,” the ministry said.
“This attack shows once again that Netanyahu’s cabinet wants to sabotage permanent ceasefire negotiations.
“The international actors who do not take measures to stop Israel are making themselves complicit in these crimes.”
In a message issued on Saturday, Iraq’s prominent Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded global denunciation of the Zionist regime’s “barbaric behavior” and asked for prevention of further harm to Palestinians.