CAIRO: An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City killed at least 17 Palestinians on Saturday, hours after two strikes in the occupied West Bank killed nine people including a local Hamas commander, Hamas said.

The Israeli military said the first of two West Bank airstrikes hit a vehicle in a town near the city of Tulkarm, targeting a fighter cell it said was on its way to carry out an attack.

A Hamas statement said one of those killed was a commander of its Tulkarm brigades, while its ally Islamic Jihad claimed the other four men who died in the strike as its fighters.

Hours later, a second airstrike in the area targeted another group of fighters who had fired on troops, Israel’s military said. Palestinian news agency Wafa said four people had died in that strike, and Hamas said all nine of those killed in the two Israeli attacks in the West Bank were fighters.

Violence in the West Bank was on the rise before the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and has risen since, with frequent Israeli raids in the territory, which is among those that the Palestinians seek for a state.

At least 17 people were killed in the Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, the Hamas run-government media office said.

The Israeli military blamed the school was being used as a command centre for Hamas, to hide fighters and manufacture weapons.

Earlier on Saturday, Israeli strikes in the enclave killed six people in a house in the southern area of Rafah and two others in Gaza City, health officials said.

They put the death toll since the Gaza crisis unfolded in October at 39,550.

The Israeli military said its forces had struck fighters and destroyed Hamas infrastructure in Rafah and elsewhere in the enclave.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2024