Gaza civil defense says Israeli strikes kill 17 including mayor

Demonstrators raise placards during an anti-government protest calling for action to secure the release of Israelis held hostage since the October 2023 attacks by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, in front of the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on December 14, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. Agence France-Presse

GAZA CITY — Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes on the territory killed 17 people on Saturday, including seven at a UN school housing displaced people that the Israeli military said was used as a Hamas command center.

Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP there were seven people killed, including women and children, and at least 10 wounded “when Israeli warplanes targeted the Al-Majida Wasila school west of Gaza City”.

The school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees but like many such facilities it has been turned into a makeshift shelter for those displaced by the war in Gaza.

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The vast majority of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the war, often multiple times.

The Israeli military said it struck “Hamas terrorists who were operating in a command and control centre embedded” within the school.

Bassal said an Israeli strike on the town hall in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza killed mayor Deiab al-Jaro, and nine other people.

The Israeli military said it targeted Jaro in a strike on “the humanitarian area in Deir el-Balah”, accusing him of being “an operative in Hamas’s military wing”.

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The war in the Gaza Strip was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 44,930 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.