GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency said a Zionist air strike on a school-turned-shelter on Saturday killed 17 people, including women and children. Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal confirmed the deaths by the Zionist shelling on the Halwa school in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia. The health ministry in Gaza said on Saturday that 32 people were killed in the Palestinian territory over the past 48 hours, taking the overall death toll to 46,537. The ministry said at least 109,571 people have been wounded in more than 15 months of war between the Zionist entity and Hamas.

The ministry of health added 499 deaths to its death toll on Saturday, specifying they have now completed the data and confirmed identities on files whose information was incomplete. A source in the ministry’s data collection department told AFP that all the 499 additional deaths were from the past several months. The number of dead in Gaza has become a matter of bitter debate since the Zionist entity launched its military campaign against Hamas in response to the Palestinian militant group’s unprecedented attack last year.

The Zionist military, in a statement, acknowledged it conducted a strike on the facility. It said the air force “conducted a precise strike on a ‘command-and-control center’ that had previously served as the Halwa school in Jabaliya. The attack was the latest in a series of Zionist strikes on school buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for more than 14 months.

A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni school in central Gaza on September 11 drew international outcry after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said six of its staff were among the 18 reported dead.

Palestinian group Hamas on Saturday said the fate of a hostage held in Gaza depends on Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a day after the captive’s wife appealed to the group for proof of life. Sharon Cunio had directly addressed the group in Arabic in a video on Friday, asking for a sign that her husband David was still alive, over 450 days after he was taken to the Palestinian territory.

Hamas’s armed branch on Saturday said that that since Sharon’s liberation, Zionist military pressure had surged and that her husband has “either been killed, injured or (is) in good health”.

Meanwhile, mediator Qatar said it briefed US President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Friday about Gaza ceasefire talks it has been brokering alongside Egypt and the United States. In their meeting in Doha, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani discussed with Witkoff “the latest developments in the region, especially the efforts aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip”, the Qatari foreign ministry said.

Earlier this month, the mediators launched a new push to end the Gaza war and secure the release of dozens of Zionist entity hostages still held captive in the Palestinian territory.

Meanwhile, an official Palestinian tally of direct deaths in the Zionist entity-Hamas war likely undercounted the number of casualties by around 40 percent in the first nine months of the war as the Gaza Strip’s healthcare infrastructure unraveled, according to a study published on Thursday.

The peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet journal was conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions. Using a statistical method called capture-recapture analysis, the researchers sought to assess the death toll from the Zionist entity’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024. They estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period, about 41 percent higher than the official Palestinian Health Ministry count. The study said 59.1 percent were women, children and people over the age of 65. It did not provide an estimate of Palestinian combatants among the dead.

More than 46,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war, according to Palestinian health officials, from a pre-war population of around 2.3 million.

The United Nations and the Zionist entity are arguing over who must fill the gap if UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA stops working in the Gaza Strip and West Bank later this month when a Zionist entity law comes into force. UNRWA still operates in the Palestinian territories but it is unclear what awaits the nearly 75-year-old agency when the law banning its operation on the Zionist entity land and contact with the Zionist entity authorities takes effect.

The UN and the Zionist entity have been engaged in tit-for-tat letter writing since the law on UNRWA was passed in late October. Shortly after, the UN told the Zionist entity it was not the world body’s responsibility to replace UNRWA in the Palestinian territory - Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In a letter to the UN General Assembly and Security Council late on Thursday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said if UNRWA was forced to stop operating then the Zionist entity “would be left to ensure that the range of services and assistance which UNRWA has been providing are provided” in accordance with its obligations under international law. Guterres wrote that while other UN agencies were prepared to continue providing services and assistance to the Palestinians - to the extent they can - that “must not be viewed as releasing the Zionist entity from its obligations.” The United Nations views Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as Zionist entity-occupied territory. International law requires an occupying power to agree to and facilitate relief programs and ensure food, medical care, hygiene and public-health standards. – Agencies