An Israeli strike on a school kills at least 22 people, Gaza Health Ministry says

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An Israeli strike on a school kills at least 22 people, Gaza Health Ministry says

2024-09-22 00:53 Last Updated At：01:00

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli strike on a school in northern Gaza on Saturday killed at least 22 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, while the Israeli army said that it targeted a Hamas command center in what used to be a school.

Another 30 were wounded in the strike on the school in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, the ministry said in a statement. Most of the casualties were women and children, it said. It wasn't immediately clear which hospital the dead and injured were taken to.

Dozens of people including children dug through the rubble of the building — its ceilings caved in, walls knocked out and a mess of wires and metal rods visible. Outside, others gathered around shrouded bodies. Some covered their faces as they wept for relatives killed in the strike.

“A missile, a missile from the plane hit us, and another missile,” said Ferial Deloul, who is displaced. “We saw the whole world covered with smoke and stones and we saw people and children cut up. … What should we do? What is our fault for this to happen to us?”

The Israeli army said earlier Saturday that it struck Hamas' “command and control center, which was embedded inside a compound that previously served” as a school. It said steps were taken to limit harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions and aerial surveillance.

Also on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said five of its workers were killed and five others wounded by Israeli fire that struck the ministry’s warehouses in the southern Musbah area.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, the Israeli army has struck several schools, packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli offensives and evacuation orders. The conflict has left 90% of Palestinians in Gaza displaced, according to figures from the United Nations.

The military has continually accused Hamas of operating from within civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including schools, U.N. facilities and hospitals. The contesting narratives over the use of schools and hospitals go to the heart of the nearly yearlong conflict.

Earlier this month, an Israeli strike hit a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing 14, according to Palestinian medical officials. The Israeli military said that it was targeting Hamas militants planning attacks from inside the school.

In July, Israeli airstrikes hit a girls' school in Deir al-Balah, killing at least 30 people sheltering inside. Israel’s military said that it targeted a Hamas command center used to direct attacks against its troops and store “large quantities of weapons.”

The war began when Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in an Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. They abducted another 250 people and are still holding around 100 hostages. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed at least 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians.

Tensions soared in the region on Friday after an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb in Lebanon killed dozens of people, including civilians and Ibrahim Akil, who was in charge of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. Also killed was Ahmed Wahbi, another senior commander in the group’s military wing.

The strike came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the rockets.

Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Top Hezbollah leader was among the 37 people killed in an Israeli strike on a Beirut apartment block

2024-09-22 00:52 Last Updated At：01:00

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a Beirut apartment block killed a senior Hezbollah leader and about a dozen other members of the militant group, Israel's military said Saturday as Lebanon raised the attack's death toll to 37, including women and children.

The airstrike during the Friday afternoon rush leveled the building in a densely populated neighborhood in southern Beirut as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, according to Israel. Among those killed was Ibrahim Akil, a top Hezbollah official who commanded the group's special forces unit the Radwan Force, the Israeli military said. Also killed was Ahmed Wahbi, another top commander in the group’s military wing, it said.

As rescue crews were still pulling bodies from the rubble on Saturday and hoping to find survivors, Israel and Hezbollah continued to trade fire, with Israel launching an intense wave of airstrikes on southern Lebanon, according to an Associated Press journalist in the area. The militant group responded by firing a bevy of rockets back at Israel, local media reported.

Lebanon's health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters that at least seven women and three children were among those killed in the strike on the Beirut building. He said another 68 people were injured, including 15 who were hospitalized, and that the casualty figure would likely rise as the search and rescue effort progressed.

It was the deadliest strike on Beirut since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Akil, the main target, had been wanted by the U.S. for years for his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s. He was under U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. State Department last year announced a reward of up to $7 million for information leading to his “identification, location, arrest, and/or conviction.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan called Akil's death “a good outcome” and said he had “American blood on his hands” for the embassy attack.

“You know 1983 seems like a long time ago,” Sullivan said. “But for a lot of families and a lot of people, they’re still living with it every day.”

Wahbi was described as a commander who played major roles within Hezbollah for decades and was imprisoned in an Israeli jail in south Lebanon in 1984. Hezbollah said he was one of the “field commanders” during a 1997 ambush in southern Lebanon that left 12 Israeli troops dead.

Hezbollah announced overnight that 15 of its operatives had been killed by Israeli forces, but it didn't how or where they died. Meanwhile, the Israeli army spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said Saturday 16 Hezbollah fighters were killed in Friday's strike.

Lebanese troops cordoned off the area around the destroyed building as Lebanese Red Cross members stood nearby to take any bodies recovered from the rubble. On Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene, where workers were still digging through the ruins.

Lebanon's minister of public works and transport, Ali Hamieh, told reporters at the scene that 23 people were still missing.

The airstrike on the crowded Qaim street knocked out an eight-story building that had 16 apartments and damaged another one adjacent to it. The missiles destroyed the building and cut through the basement where the meeting of Hezbollah officials was being held, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.

Shops in a nearby building were badly damaged.

Friday's strike came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, largely targeting Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets.

The militant group said its latest wave of rocket salvos was a response to Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. However, it came days after mass explosions of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies killed at least 37 people, including two children, and wounded roughly 3,000 others.

Abiad, the Lebanese health minister, said Saturday that hospitals across the country were filled with the wounded.

The pager and walkie-talkie attacks have been widely attributed to Israel, which hasn't confirmed or denied involvement. They marked a major escalation in the past 11 months of simmering conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.

It wasn't immediately clear if anyone was killed or wounded in the back-and-forth attacks between Israel and Hezbollah on Saturday. The Israeli army confirmed that about 90 rockets had been fired at northern Israel, while Israeli air attacks and artillery units targeted a number of sites, including rocket launchers in Lebanon that it said were poised to attack.

Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet said stopping Hezbollah’s attacks on the country’s north, which would allow displaced residents to return to their homes, is now an official war goal, as it considers a wider military operation in Lebanon that could spark an all-out conflict. Israel has since sent a powerful fighting force to its northern border.

Hezbollah has maintained that it will halt its strikes only when a cease-fire is reached in Gaza.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire regularly since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel ignited the Israeli military’s devastating offensive in Gaza. But previous cross-border attacks have largely struck areas in northern Israel that had been evacuated and less-populated parts of southern Lebanon.

Also on Saturday, at an annual military parade in Tehran, Iran’s armed forces unveiled a new ballistic missile, state TV reported. The report said that the Jahad is a single-stage liquid-fuel ballistic missile with a high-explosive warhead and a range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), making it theoretically capable of reaching Israel.

The United States says missile development by Iran, a backer of Hezbollah, defies a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Iran to undertake no activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

Associated Press writer Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem, White House correspondent Zeke Miller in Wilmington, Delaware, and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.