Gaza: On April 23 and 24, 2025, Israeli warplanes struck multiple civilian sites across the Gaza Strip, killing a total of 50 people as families sought refuge from the fighting. In Gaza City, bombs pounded the Yaffa School shelter and nearby tent camps, where dozens of displaced residents had gathered.
Witnesses said at least 45 men, women and children died when the school’s classrooms and makeshift tents were turned to rubble and flames swept through the site. Mourners carried the bodies of young victims, many of them children, as overwhelmed rescue crews, hampered by damaged equipment, struggled to reach survivors under continuous bombardment.
Before dawn on April 24, a separate airstrike hit a home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of northwestern Gaza City, killing a father, a mother and their four young children inside their collapsed house. Neighbours and civil defence teams arrived to find the children’s bodies and limbs scattered across the street and among nearby buildings.
Rescue workers, many of whose vehicles and tools had already been damaged by earlier attacks, painstakingly gathered every piece. No one survived the blast, and teams then raced against time to free dozens more people trapped under wreckage elsewhere in the city.
These deadly strikes unfolded against an eight-week Israeli blockade that has cut off all food, medicine and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The United Nations describes the blockade as a “deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life,” and Gaza’s health ministry warns of “dangerous and catastrophic” levels of malnutrition, especially among women and children. Hospitals are overwhelmed, medical supplies are nearly exhausted, and families say they have nowhere safe to turn as the enclave faces its worst crisis since hostilities escalated in October 2023.
