Eight dead in Israel strike on Gaza school building

Gaza's civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike on a school-turned-shelter on Saturday killed eight people, including two children.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal confirmed eight people, including two children and two women, were killed by Israeli shelling on the Halwa school in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia.

Bassal said the strike would 30 people, including 19 children, and that the Halwa school housed "thousands of displaced people".

The Israeli military, in a statement, acknowledged it conducted a strike on the facility.

The attack was the latest in a series of Israeli 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.

The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where thousands of Gazans have sought shelter -- a charge denied by the Palestinian group.

The health ministry in Hamas-run 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 Israel and Hamas, triggered by the Palestinian group's October 7, 2023 attack.

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 Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas.

Israeli authorities have repeatedly questioned the credibility of the Gaza health ministry's figures.

But a study published Friday by British medical journal The Lancet estimated that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the Israel-Hamas war was around 40 percent higher than recorded by the health ministry.

The new peer-reviewed study used data from the ministry, an online survey and social media obituaries, but only counted deaths from traumatic injuries. It did not include those from a lack of health care or food, or the thousands of missing believed to be buried under rubble.

The UN considers the Gaza health ministry's numbers to be reliable.