Press Release: Veritas Press C.I.C. Author: Kamran Faqir Article Date Published: 22 Aug 2025 at 16:34 GMT Category: Middle East | Palestine-Gaza | US-Israel At War Source(s): Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies
What Happened:
Local medics and reporters say an Israeli strike hit the Amr Ibn al-Aas School in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan, then serving as a shelter, killing at least 12 people, including children, with more dead and wounded in nearby hits the same day. Footage from the scene shows bodies and frantic evacuations through school courtyards and tents. Additional strikes in Sheikh Radwan and al-Shati were reported within hours; rescue crews described difficulty reaching victims amid ongoing fire in Sabra and Zeitoun.
Though details can vary by outlet and hour in an active war zone, multiple wires and agencies tracked the same arc: fatalities in a school-shelter strike inside Gaza City, part of a wider daily toll across the Strip as armour massed near dense neighbourhoods.
Eyewitnesses, Teachers, And Medics:
Because foreign access to northern Gaza is extremely limited, the most immediate accounts come from local educators, medics, and journalists:
- “A building full of displaced people [was] levelled in the blink of an eye,” a Gaza City journalist told Human Rights Watch in a separate school-strike probe; the language maps closely to Friday’s Sheikh Radwan images.
- Save the Children’s regional lead, Jeremy Stoner, warned that Gaza’s students are “traumatised,” with schools “not only schools… shelters,” as learning spaces collapse into mass-casualty scenes.
Claims And Counter-Claims:
The Israeli military has repeatedly argued that some school compounds are used for command sites, making them “legitimate” targets; after a previous strike, it said the site “previously served as Amr Ibn al-Aas school” but was being used by militants. Civil defence and residents counter that thousands of civilians were sheltering there and that no warning preceded the blast.
Independent rights-group forensics increasingly undercut the idea that civilians in school shelters had meaningful protection. A new Human Rights Watch investigation found remnants from US-made munitions at two different school strikes and concluded that “hundreds” of school buildings have been hit since October 2023, many while sheltering displaced families. HRW calls several of these attacks “unlawfully indiscriminate.”
Amnesty International, reviewing months of patterns (including siege tactics and repeated hits on shelters), argues the campaign shows “nowhere safe in Gaza” and has urged states to halt arms transfers used in apparent war crimes; Amnesty has also condemned Israel’s recent decision to “take control of Gaza City” as entrenching unlawful occupation.
Evacuation Orders Vs. The Map Civilians Actually Face:
On the eve of the Sheikh Radwan blast, Israeli officials said they were issuing “initial warning calls” to aid and medical groups to prepare civilians for new evacuations from Gaza City. Residents and UN agencies point out that such guidance often moves people from one kill zone to another, and that mass displacement now collides with starvation and disease.
Policy Throughlines: “Total Victory,” “Security Control,” And Far-Right Pressure:
Understanding why schools keep getting hit requires listening to the senior Israeli officials who set the war’s guardrails, and to the coalition partners pushing them further:
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged “total victory” and insists Israel must retain security control over all territory west of the Jordan River, a position that forecloses Palestinian sovereignty and undergirds open-ended military control in Gaza. In recent weeks, he also said Israel “intends to take military control of all of Gaza,” approving plans to seize Gaza City while reviving cease-fire talks on Israel’s terms.
- Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has repeatedly promoted “voluntary” emigration of Gazans and has spoken of re-occupation; at one point, he said half of Gaza’s population could be “encouraged” to leave “within two years.” The US publicly condemned such calls as “irresponsible.”
- National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has urged re-settlement and the “encouraged” migration of Palestinians from Gaza, framing it as the “most moral solution,” while pushing for occupation.
These aren’t stray remarks. Ministers attended conferences expressly advocating “voluntary migration” out of Gaza; critics, from UN officials to Israeli and international jurists, warn that such policies normalise forced displacement and collective punishment.
How Rhetoric Meets The Rubble:
Investigative trendlines now converge:
- Target set expansion: Loosened strike constraints in civilian-dense areas (including schools) have been reported by multiple outlets, with rights groups documenting repeated civilian mass-casualty events at shelters.
- Civilian choke points: HRW has documented lethal fire at aid points and along evacuation routes, compounding the “no safe choices” reality for displaced families.
- Stated end-state: Senior leaders openly describe long-term Israeli control in Gaza; far-right ministers market depopulation as a “solution.” When mapped onto strike data hitting shelters, this helps explain why displacement orders often precede or coincide with mass-casualty incidents in places civilians were told to go.
Accountability Questions:
- Proportionality & precautions: Even if militants are present, the obligation to take all feasible precautions remains. Hitting a known shelter where families sleep at scale, especially without verifiable, effective warnings, raises serious IHL concerns. HRW’s munition identifications (US-origin) further implicate supplier states’ duties to prevent assistance to violations.
- Intent & policy: While Israeli officials deny intent to target civilians, the policy signals “total victory,” permanent security control, and “encouraging migration”, align with outcomes on the ground: destroyed civilian infrastructure, emptied neighbourhoods, and recurring strikes on schools. Amnesty and others argue these constitute unlawful acts and potentially genocide, claims Israel rejects.
What To Watch Next:
- Whether Israel proceeds with its Gaza City takeover plan while cease-fire terms circulate, and how that shapes strike patterns in declared shelters.
- Independent verifications (satellite, crater analysis, fragment IDs) for the Sheikh Radwan school hit; HRW’s recent school-strike forensics set a technical template.
- International responses to senior ministers’ migration/resettlement rhetoric and any administrative steps that operationalise it.
Conclusion: Erasure by Design.
The massacre at Sheikh Radwan’s Amr Ibn al-Aas School is not an accident of war; it is part of a deliberate system. Schools, hospitals, mosques, markets, and makeshift shelters have become death traps: places where Israel’s military orders civilians to flee, only to later be struck without warning. Families are herded into so-called “safe zones” and then carpet-bombed by the Israeli Air Force.
Human Rights Watch has traced fragments of U.S.-made munitions in the ruins of schools hit earlier this summer. Amnesty International stresses that “nowhere is safe” in Gaza, as shelter after shelter is turned into rubble. Teachers, medics, and journalists inside the Strip describe the same bleak cycle: mass displacement under fire, followed by mass casualties in the very sites of refuge. As one Gaza teacher lamented, “Our schools are shelters and graveyards.”
Overlay these human testimonies with the official record: Prime Minister Netanyahu vowing “total victory” and permanent “security control” over all of Gaza; Finance Minister Smotrich promoting “voluntary migration” of Gazans; National Security Minister Ben-Gvir openly pushing “re-settlement.” Their words are not abstract; they align with a battlefield reality where the Palestinian civilian population is forced into confined zones, stripped of food, water, and medical care, and then targeted from the air.
This is not collateral damage; it is policy. It is the architecture of erasure. The Sheikh Radwan school strike crystallises the method: civilians forced into shelters, then annihilated. Western complicity, through the provision of bombs, diplomatic cover, and media deflection, makes partner states complicit in crimes that bear the hallmarks of genocide.
The question is not whether international law has been broken; it has, but whether the global community is willing to confront a project that is systematically depopulating Gaza by turning every sanctuary into a grave.
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