AT LEAST 15 Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces stormed a Gaza school sheltering displaced families, amid a wave of attacks across the besieged Palestinian territory killing dozens more, including two journalists overnight on Saturday night.
Several others were also injured in the Israeli attack on Khalil Oweida School in Beit Hanoon in northern Gaza on Sunday morning.
They have nowhere to go because the Israeli military forces are encircling the area with tanks and armoured vehicles, and hammering the school with heavy artillery.
Among those killed were a family of four, including two children, after the classroom where they were sheltering took a direct hit from artillery fire.
Many of the injured are in the courtyard of the school and inside the other classrooms. They can’t get any treatment because none of the hospitals in Beit Hanoon are operational. The storming of the school happened without prior warning.
It was later reported yesterday that those who remained at the besieged school, many of them women and children, were being forced to leave the area and move towards a military checkpoint set up at Salah al-Din Street.
Several of the men were reportedly detained, while the siege of the school is still under way.
In all, at least 46 Palestinians were killed across Gaza in the 24 hours up to midday yesterday.
- Palestinian journalist Mohammed Jabr al-Qrinawi was killed along with his wife and children in an Israeli air attack that targeted their home in Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza, late on Saturday.
The Egypt-based Al-Ahram reported that al-Qrinawi was affiliated with Sanad News Agency. Al-Qrinawi was the second journalist killed on Saturday.
Earlier on Saturday, Al Mashhad Media said its journalist Mohammed Balousha was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza.
George Eid, director of news at Al Mashhad, confirmed Balousha’s killing, saying it was a targeted attack.
Balousha was the Palestinian journalist who broke the story on the decomposing bodies of premature babies in the ICU, who were left to die by Israeli forces at al-Nasr Hospital last year.
The separate killings of al-Qrinawi and Balousha raise the death toll of Palestinian journalists to 196. The Committee to Protect Journalists has compiled records of at least 137 Palestinian journalists killed.
On Tuesday, two separate reports from media freedom organisations said Israel carried out a ‘massacre’ of journalists in Gaza.
