GAZA: Civil defense rescuers in Gaza said a Zionist strike Thursday on a school-turned-shelter killed at least 15 people. The vast majority of the besieged Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the war, with many seeking shelter in school buildings. Civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said there were “15 martyrs, including children and women, and dozens wounded, some of them seriously, following a (Zionist) bombardment of Al-Falluja school in Jabalia camp in north Gaza”.

Bassal earlier said the death toll was seven. The Zionist military claimed it carried out “precise strikes” targeting Hamas fighters operating inside what it said was a command-and-control center at the Al-Falluja school. Thursday’s attack was the latest in a series of Zionist strikes on school buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for nearly a year.

A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni School in central Gaza on Sept 11 drew international outcry after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said six of its staffers were among the 18 reported fatalities. At least 41,534 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians, have been killed in the Zionist military campaign in Gaza.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza on Thursday accused the Zionist army of treating exhumed bodies in an “inhumane” manner, saying it deposited a container containing scores of dead Palestinians without proper documentation. The Zionist army rejected the accusation, saying its policy was to treat the bodies of the deceased “with dignity and respect”.

However, the Gaza health ministry said the Zionist army sent back a container on Wednesday containing 88 bodies “without any data or information that could help identify” them. The ministry accused the Zionist entity of “exhuming graves and stealing bodies”, saying it held the Zionist entity “fully responsible for the inhumane and unethical treatment of the bodies”. An AFP photographer saw a crowd gathered around the bodies on Thursday as they were unloaded from a truck, wrapped in blue tarp. — AFP