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OAN’s Brooke Mallory
6:16 PM – Thursday, June 6, 2024
Israel was urged by the U.S. State Department to be completely “transparent” on an airstrike that occurred on Thursday morning at a central Gaza school, which was said to have allegedly killed at least 35 people.
However, previous AP News reports have shown that “Hamas, Gaza’s ruling authority, exerts control over the Health Ministry” and the terrorist group distinguishes the number of fatalities and injuries, so death toll numbers have been labeled as Hamas disinformation in prior incidents.
In addition to schools and heavily populated areas, Hamas “operates inside and underneath hospitals, and is using them for military operations, including as command centers, weapons stores, and to hide hostages. The Israelis have released footage they say is evidence of those Hamas operations,” according to CNN.
Two missiles fired by a warplane targeting Hamas members who were hiding in classrooms on the upper floor of the school in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp were reported to the BBC by local journalists.
“Documents were [also previously] found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders… They include detailed maps and show that Hamas intended to kill or take hostage civilians and schoolchildren,” according to NBC News.
The Government Media Office in Gaza, which is also controlled by Hamas, refuted the Israeli military’s assertion that it carried out a “precise” strike on a “Hamas compound” within the school.
Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller asserted that the identities of the “Hamas fighters” should be identified, the BBC reported. Although Israel typically does so anyway, the U.S. still rarely presses Israel to identify terrorists it has killed in airstrikes.
“The government of Israel has said that they are going to release more information about this strike, including the names of those who died in it,” Miller said. “We expect them to be fully transparent in making that information public.”
Soon after, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari released the identities of nine Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters who were reportedly killed in the strike on Thursday night. After more work, he promised that even more would be discovered in order to “verify the information.”
The strike happened early on Thursday, according to local journalists and locals. It occurred at al-Sardi school, which is located in a heavily populated, long-standing section of the camp where UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, offers services.
Additionally, it was recently revealed that at least 10% of the UNRWA staff were either directly working for or involved with Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Six of the individuals engaged in the Oct. 7th attack are said to have participated in the actual assault, while the remaining individuals oversaw logistics, including obtaining weapons. Two participated in the kidnapping of Israelis, while two more were traced to the locations of the slaughter of Israeli civilians.
Soon after this discovery, the U.S. paused funding, and UN spokespersons subsequently claimed that those individuals were quickly identified and fired.
Fast forward to now. Social media posts featuring footage of multiple classrooms in one of the school’s buildings being destroyed, along with bodies covered in blankets and white shrouds, have begun surfacing online.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the UNRWA, claimed that numerous injuries and at least 35 fatalities had occurred. Juliette Touma, the agency’s head of communications, stated to the BBC that “the figures are coming from our own UNRWA colleagues on the ground.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced in a statement that they had carried out a “precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside” the school. Two upper floors of the building’s classrooms were marked on an annotated aerial shot as the “locations of the terrorists,” according to the IDF.
However, Miller seemingly judged Israel in a speech in Washington on Thursday, saying: “We’ve seen the claims that 14 children were killed in this strike, and certainly, when you see—if that is accurate—that 14 children were killed, those aren’t terrorists.”
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