News - Middle East: After the Israeli regime claimed to have killed 19 members of Hamas in its latest attack on a Gaza City school to justify the massacre, investigations reveal the victims were all ordinary Palestinian civilians, and most of them had already been killed in previous strikes.

Early on Saturday morning, when hundreds of Palestinians were performing the dawn prayer, three Israeli missile strikes pounded the Tabaeen School, where about 6,000 internally displaced people were sheltering, killing more than 100 people, including women and children.

Reports indicate that the Israeli bombing specifically targeted the prayer hall where displaced people were performing prayers, as well as the upper prayer hall housing women and children.

According to the Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, the US-made bombs, some of which weighed about two thousand pounds, had immense destructive power, reducing the victims’ bodies to “shredded pieces” and “burned parts”, causing numerous serious injuries among the survivors.

Louay Nasser, a 30-year-old Palestinian who is living with his family in a classroom at Tabaeen School, said when he arrived at the scene of the explosion, he froze in shock at the horror that had unfolded.

“There were pieces of men, women and children lying in front of me … heads separated from bodies, hands and legs all over,” Nasser was quoted as saying.

“It was very difficult, but the worst was the man who was on fire, running and screaming. We ran over to him and put out the fire. He had burns all over his body to a massive degree.”

The attack is one of the deadliest against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during more than 10 months of Israeli genocidal war which has killed nearly 40,000 people so far.

To evade international scrutiny and deflect the blame on the Palestinian resistance, the Israeli military claimed that the school was being used as a command center by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

In a statement, it said the death toll reported by the Gaza health authorities was “inflated” and claimed that the strike had killed at least 19 resistance fighters, including senior Hamas commanders.