Most of injured in Gaza school bombing are amputees: Hospital head

Head of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, Dr Fadel Naeem, affirmed that most of the injured who were admitted Saturday to the hospital due to the Israeli shelling in a school sheltering displaced people, had sustained severe burns, alongside people with amputated limbs.

Speaking to Qatar News Agency (QNA), Dr Fadel Naeem added that numerous wounded people were martyred during the surgical procedures on tables due to lack of medical devices, pointing out that the hospital lacks the simplest medical potential, as well as units of blood banking to save lives.

He highlighted that 70 martyrs were identified upon arrival at the medical facility, due to the Israeli bombing of displaced worshippers at the school, but it was impossible to identify nearly 15 martyrs since they arrived in the hospital as remains.

The hospital is the only health facility that provides services in Gaza province after the Israeli army destroyed Shifa Hospital. Moreover, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital's capacity can barely accommodate the sheer number of injured due to the ongoing Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip for the 11th day.

For his part, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said the Israeli fighter jets directly targeted flat of a school housing women and children, as well as a basement where displaced people were praying. He added that numerous remains and bodies that were ripped into pieces could not be identified, as families could hardly identify them and there were missing people whose fate was unknown.

As per estimation of civil defense personnel, the massacre in Al-Tabieen School in Gaza City is the third one, in terms of the scope of disaster, following Ahli Baptist hospital and Al-Mawasi massacres in Khan Younis.

Additionally, Gaza's government media office confirmed that the medical and rescue personnel couldn't recover the bodies of all martyrs due to this horrendous massacre, along with the substantial number of casualties, pointing out that they face extreme difficulty in pulling out bodies and amputated limbs of the injured.

In a statement, the office added that the Israeli forces pounded the school with three missiles each one of them weighs 2000 pounds of explosives, indicating that Israeli forces had a prior knowledge that there were displaced people inside the school.

Eyewitnesses said that most of the targeted victims were elderly and children, noting that the bodies of the martyrs were burned and scattered into charred remains that piled up in the prayer area and some scattered in the schoolyard due to the intensity of the bombardment that targeted them during the dawn prayer.

The Israeli occupation army pursues a systematic policy in targeting schools and shelter centers that house displaced people in Gaza, with the latest figures indicating that the number of shelter centers overwhelmed with displaced people that had been hit by Israel, since the start of genocide in Gaza, reached 173 schools and shelter centers, of which 152 were densely populate schools, some of them were public UNRWA-run schools, which led to hundreds of casualties.