‘Children torn apart’: Israel strike rains hell on Gaza dawn prayers

Displaced Palestinians gather in the yard of a school hit by an Israeli strike in Gaza City – Copyright AFP Robyn Beck

White body bags littered the floor and mourning filled the air after a school housing displaced Palestinians was struck with Israeli missiles Saturday — a horrific and increasingly common sight in the Gaza war.

Dawn prayers were shattered by the early morning triple air strike from Israeli warplanes, which gutted Al-Tabieen religious school and mosque in Gaza City.

In the hellish aftermath, body parts were strewn around the rubble and charred, bloodied bodies slumped in the wreckage of the two-storey complex.

Grim-faced volunteers piled corpses in blood-stained blankets into an ambulance, as seriously wounded men lay groaning on the ground.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said at least 93 people were killed, 17 of them women and children, making it one of the war’s deadliest strikes.

Israel’s military disputed the death toll, saying the school was targeted with “precision munitions” because it “served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility”.

Such incidents have become a pattern in recent weeks. According to an AFP tally, at least 14 schools sheltering Gaza’s displaced have been hit since July 6, killing more than 280 people.

“Peaceful people — women, children, and youths — were performing the Fajr prayer as usual when suddenly a missile hit them,” said Abu Wassim, who lives nearby and came to survey the scene.

“They were reduced to remains. Children were torn apart, and women were burned. What can we say or do? What is in our power?”

– ‘They were just praying’ –

As the sun climbed and mourners gathered, one man stroked the face of a dead child shrouded in a plastic body bag.

“They dropped a missile on them while they were just praying. Fear God, people! Fear God, Arabs!” a woman wailed over the body.

Another man looked lost as he held a small corpse wrapped in a blanket. Nearby, six body bags lay on the ground, three of them children. Tattered Korans were piled on a window ledge.

“We woke up before dawn to the sound of a strike,” said Sakr, a resident from the neighbourhood who gave just one name.

“We headed to the site and found body remains of civilians who were peacefully performing prayers. We found bodies of children scattered in the street.”

Another man said: “You can’t even recognise the bodies, there were scattered remains. 

“The ones who were struck are displaced people taking shelter in a school. What’s their fault? What have they done wrong?”

Mohammad Al-Mughayyir, director of the supply and equipment department of Gaza’s civil defence service, told AFP that six schools in Gaza City had been targeted in the past week alone.

Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Nadav Shoshani said that about 20 Hamas and Islamic militants were operating from the Al-Tabieen complex.

“The compound, and the mosque that was struck within it, served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility,” he posted on X.

Later on Saturday, Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told journalists that the strike “directly targeted” two floors of the school.

The strike hit “the upper floor housing women and children and the ground floor that was used for prayers by the displaced people,” he said.

The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Palestinian militants seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 39 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,790 people, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.