As the U.N. criticized the strike, Israel said the former school had become a haven for militants.
The site, once known as Al-Jaouni School, had been home to around 12,000 displaced people from the Gaza Strip, mainly women and children, according to the United Nations, which operated the school. Israel has struck the compound five separate times since the war began last October, it said.
The Palestinian authorities said the Israeli strike on Wednesday killed 18 Gazans. Among them were six U.N. employees, including the shelter’s manager, the most U.N. employees to die in a single strike in Gaza since the war began, the organization said.
Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, on Thursday joined in criticism from the United Nations and others, called the deaths of the U.N. workers “appalling” and reiterated calls for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The government of Qatar, a key mediator in talks over a cease-fire, called the strike a “horrifying massacre.”
The Israeli military continued to defend the strike, saying the compound in Nuseirat was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has repeatedly made in an effort to justify increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.
Israel issued a list of nine names of people it said were Hamas militants who had been killed in the strike, including three that it said were employees of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians. UNRWA could not be immediately reached for comment on the claim.
Earlier, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said
that the military had asked the United Nations for the identities of the six employees it said were killed so Israel could “thoroughly review the claim” that they were U.N. workers, but that the organization had so far not provided them.