An Israeli air strike yesterday killed 10 people and wounded about 30 others in a UN-run school in the southern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian official said, the second Israeli attack to hit a UN-run school in less than a week.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli shelling killed at least 30 people in Gaza on the twenty-seventh day of fighting.
The fighting yesterday pushed the Gaza death toll given by Palestinian officials to 1,772, most of them civilians. Israel has confirmed that 64 soldiers have died in combat, while Palestinian rockets have also killed three civilians in Israel.
In the town of Rafah, a missile from an Israeli aircraft struck the school where Palestinians who had fled their homes were sheltering, witnesses and medics said.
Ashraf Al-Qidra, spokesman for the Gaza health ministry, said 10 people were killed and 30 wounded.
Robert Serry, UN Middle East Special Coordinator, said the school had been sheltering 3,000 displaced persons and the strike caused multiple deaths and injuries.
“It is simply intolerable that another school has come under fire while designated to provide shelter for civilians fleeing the hostilities,” he said.
Last Wednesday, at least 15 Palestinians who sought refuge in a UN-run school in Jabalya refugee camp were killed during fighting, and the UN said Israeli artillery had apparently hit the building. The Israeli military said gunmen had fired mortar bombs from near the school and it shot back in response.
In Rafah, Fatah faction leader and local resident Ashraf Goma said locals were unable to deal with the casualties.
“Bodies of the wounded are bleeding in the streets and corpses are laid on the road with no one able to recover them.”
“I saw a man on a donkey cart bringing seven bodies into the hospital. Bodies are being kept in ice-cream refrigerators, in flower and vegetable coolers,” Goma told Reuters.
Truce efforts
In Cairo, efforts to find a new truce were scheduled to resume yesterday.
A delegation from Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad arrived in the Egyptian capital, but a quick breakthrough seemed unlikely in the absence of Israeli representatives.
After accusing Hamas of breaching a US and UN-brokered ceasefire on Friday, Israel said it would not send envoys as scheduled.
The Israeli government said that the destruction of a network of tunnels underneath Israel’s walled frontier they say were built by Hamas to deliver fighters into Israeli territory is the main objective of the army’s current operation.
The Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said three dozen tunnels had been unearthed and destroyed and “we are finishing up de-commissioning these tunnels.”
“We hope that that job will be completed in a matter of hours, not days,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Israel began its offensive against Gaza on July 8 following a surge of cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas and other guerrillas.
Cairo talks
The talks in Cairo, without Israeli participation, were unlikely to produce any breakthrough, as Israel’s and Hamas’ positions remain far apart.
Israel says it wants Gaza demilitarized under any long-term arrangement. Hamas demands Israel withdraw its troops and a lifting of Israeli and Egyptian blockades that have choked Gaza’s economy.
Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, a member of Netanyahu’s decision-making security cabinet, said any agreement on the issue was still far off.
“You want to talk about lifting the blockade? Not with us, and not now,” she told the news website Ynet.
The United Nations said 460,000 people had been displaced by the fighting - a quarter of Gaza’s population.
