Thirteen Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza, WAFA says

At least 13 Palestinians were killed and 15 wounded in Israeli strikes on a school sheltering refugees and a residential building in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA reported early on Saturday.

At least eight of the dead were in refugee tents at Halima Al-Sa’diyya School in Jabalia in northern Gaza, WAFA said.

The Israeli army said in a statement it had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control center… embedded inside a compound that previously served as the ‘Halima Al-Sa’diyya’ School in the northern Gaza Strip.”

In a separate incident, five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on a residential building in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered Oct. 7 last year when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed over 40,800 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.

According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip are internally displaced, including some uprooted more than 10 times.