GAZA CITY: White body bags littered the floor and mourning filled the air after a school housing displaced Palestinians was struck with Zionist missiles Saturday — a horrific and increasingly common sight in the Gaza war. Dawn prayers were shattered by the early morning triple air strike from Zionist 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 defense agency said at least 93 people were killed, 17 of them women and children, making it one of the war’s deadliest strikes.

The Zionist 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?”

A young man mourns over the corpse of a person killed in the Zionist strike on the school.

‘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 Qurans were piled on a window ledge. “We woke up before dawn to the sound of a strike,” said Sakr, a resident from the neighborhood 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 recognize 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 defense service, told AFP that six schools in Gaza City had been targeted in the past week alone. Zionist 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 defense 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. — AFP