A day after Israeli forces bombed a United Nations school compound in central Gaza that was providing shelter for displaced Palestinians, some facts remain unclear or in dispute.
Israel said it struck three classrooms occupied by between 20 and 30 Palestinian militants, some of whom took part in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, but had no idea about civilian casualties. Gaza health officials said many of the dozens of dead were children and women. Here's what we know and don't know.
What was bombed?
The high-rise was one of several that made up the UNRWA Nuseirat Preparatory School for Boys, one of many schools run in the Gaza Strip by the UN's flagship agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
Like all the schools in the area, it stopped operating in October after Hamas attacked Israel and Israel began retaliatory bombings, and like many others, it became overcrowded with people displaced by the war from other parts of Gaza, who took refuge in schools, hospitals and other facilities they hoped would be less likely to be bombed.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees, said the school is home to 6,000 people. About three-quarters of the Gaza Strip's roughly 2.2 million residents have been displaced, many of them multiple times.
The Israeli military has called the school in Nuseirat a militant base and claims that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters are using three of the school's classrooms to plan and carry out operations against Israel.
How many people were killed in Nuseirat and who were they?
The Israeli military on Friday released the names of eight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters it said were killed in the attack, adding to a list released on Thursday, bringing the total to 17.
Military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said Thursday that he was “not aware of any civilian casualties” from the attack. The military did not respond Friday when asked whether that was still the case.
But witnesses, medical sources and Gaza officials said dozens of civilians were killed, many of them children and women.
A Gaza Health Ministry official said Thursday that at least 41 people were killed, while another official said the figure was 46. Yasser Khattab, an official overseeing the morgue at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Ba'a, where many of the bodies were taken, said 46 people were killed, including 18 children and nine women, but Khattab's statement could not be independently verified.
Khattab said the hospital has a well-rehearsed system for recording and identifying bodies and body parts. “We are looking for any evidence that can help identify the person,” he said.
A New York Times reporter who visited the hospital after the bombing saw it packed with bodies of dead, survivors and relatives of both, with medical workers struggling to make their way through the crowds. Witnesses described pulling bodies of children from the rubble of a school.
Karin Hastur, medical coordinator for the aid group Doctors Without Borders, who works at the hospital, said the majority of patients she had seen over the past few days were women and children.
How prudent was Israel's behavior?
The bombing in Nuseirat illustrates the grim calculations of the eight-month-old war. Hamas, which operates in densely populated areas, has been accused of cynically using Palestinians and civilian infrastructure as a shield. Israel has targeted Hamas, regularly killing civilians, and has been accused by its allies of using excessive and indiscriminate force.
The Israeli military claims the airstrikes were carefully and precisely planned, targeting only three rooms in the school used by militants. Gaza officials say Israel used American-made GBU-39 bombs, carrying about 37 pounds of explosives, at both camps in Rafah, where an Israeli bombing and subsequent fire killed 45 people in late May. The military says this is the smallest bomb its warplanes carry.
The military said between 20 and 30 militants, including some who took part in the Oct. 7 attack, were based at the school. It said it had been monitoring them for three days before striking when it would cause the fewest civilian casualties.
International laws of war prohibit the use of facilities such as hospitals, schools and places of worship for military purposes, and also prohibit armed forces from attacking such facilities, with limited exceptions if they are being used by an enemy.
Israel argues that it operates within this exception because Hamas routinely operates within these buildings and in the tunnels beneath them, making civilian casualties inevitable.
“We know that Hamas still exists and still has capabilities above and below ground,” Lerner said Thursday.
In recent months, Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to places they once captured, such as Nuseirat, only to move on after Hamas fighters re-emerged, which Israeli officials said demonstrated the need to carry out attacks like Thursday's.
Legal experts say the extent to which an attacker can go in such operations will vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on how well they protect civilians and distinguish them from combatants, and how proportional the attack is to their military interest. In other words, it can be very murky in any given case.
Richard Pérez Peña and Efrat Livni Contributed report.