Tuesday night, thirty-three hundred people were crowded into the Jabaliya Primary School for Girls, in Gaza, when, according to the United Nations, the school was hit three times by explosions. “Children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom,” the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said in a statement. The girls’ school is run by the U.N. and had been turned into a designated shelter; “our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school,” the statement said. Some twenty people are dead, according to press reports, which have included footage of wounded children and blood-stained clumps of bedding. The U.N. had more numbers: the school’s “precise location” and use as a shelter for displaced civilians had, it said, been “communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection; the last being at ten to nine last night.” The Israel Defense Forces are investigating what happened, but already have suggested a scenario: an “initial inquiry suggests that militants fired mortars earlier this morning from the vicinity of U.N.R.W.A. school in Jabaliya,” an I.D.F. spokesman said, as quoted by the BBC. Israeli soldiers “responded by firing towards the origin of fire.”
Israel has said, repeatedly, that it does not “target” schools, and that it is just trying to stop Hamas from firing rockets at Israel and using tunnels, not just to smuggle goods in and get around a blockade on Gaza but to send fighters into areas where Israelis live—and there are rockets and tunnels that pose a threat. (There was reportedly a tunnel infiltration Monday night, leading to an incident in which Israeli soldiers were killed.) But schools are getting hit and, when they are, children and adults are killed; granting that avoiding civilian deaths is, with all good will, part of Israel’s plan, the plan is not working. Thirteen hundred Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in this round of fighting, along with fifty-eight Israelis. Another U.N. school turned shelter, in Beit Hanoun, was hit last week; Israel has sharply contested that it was responsible for that, suggesting that a Hamas rocket that fell short was responsible, and conceding only that it might have bombed the schoolyard when it was empty; it has videos, though the U.N., as the BBC notes, disputes that they are clear enough to show whether anyone was there. (An empty schoolyard, a place without play, is an odd sort of ideal.) The schools in Gaza are packed with refugees of all ages—about two hundred thousand displaced people, or one in nine people in Gaza, have taken shelter in them. As the U.N. said, “These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army. ” “My house was burned and death followed us here,” a man named Ahmed Mousa, who was at the school bombed on Tuesday, told the Times. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked that question in an exchange last Sunday on “Meet the Press.” He responded, “We’re not targeting a single civilian. We’re responding to Hamas action, and we’re telling the civilians to leave; Hamas is telling them to stay. Why is it telling them to stay? Because it wants to pile up their own dead bodies.”
“But where can they go?” David Gregory, the host, asked. “You say they should leave. Where can they reasonably go?”
NETANYAHU: I’ll get to it.
GREGORY: O.K.
NETANYAHU: I’ll tell you, there are plenty of places they can go to. But Hamas is making sure that they don’t go anywhere.
This line of argument gets tangled. It would be a simple thing, Netanyahu suggests, for Palestinians to listen to the I.D.F.’s warnings—which come in the form of text messages and announcements and admonitions not to let someone Israel might target live in one’s home—and go. Civilians die, according to this logic, because they didn’t listen to Israel; they listened to Hamas. But there are not “plenty of places” that are safe; there may not be any. There is, one would think, a special obligation for Israel to take care about the people in the shelters, because those children had gone where it sent them. What sort of calculus is involved in leaving one’s own home for a shelter that might still be hit, or maybe for one of the multigenerational homes in Gaza—where, perhaps, there’s also a second cousin who has something to do with Hamas? Does knowing that you are in danger put all of the burden on you? Does it make you the culpable one if you can’t, or don’t, get away? It may be practical to become a refugee—even to leave Gaza, if one can—but it’s not a gift or, necessarily, a credit to the one who warned you to go. And if Hamas is “making sure that they don’t go anywhere,” what use—practically or morally—are the warnings, not only to the Palestinians but to the Israelis who look to them for reassurance?
Netanyahu added that rockets had been found in another U.N. School, and that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “condemned Hamas, he condemned Hamas for turning these schools into military targets, legitimate military targets.” The phrase that the Secretary General’s spokesman used, though, was “potential military targets,” which is different from “legitimate”; in a subsequent statement, after the Beit Hanoun incident, the Secretary General referred to “the inviolability of U.N. premises.” The Israeli government can decide, and perhaps it has, that Hamas has forced its hand, and that all complaints should be forwarded in that direction. That is harder on days like these. As the wounded were being treated at the girls’ school, Israel said that it would observe a partial four-hour humanitarian ceasefire, adding, according to the Times, that it only applied to areas where there wasn’t fighting anyway, and that people who’d been told to leave their homes shouldn’t use the window to return to them. The children, apparently—the ones sleeping in classrooms—should stay.
Update: Chris Guinness, the U.N.R.W.A. spokesman, broke down crying on Al Jazeera when talking about what was happening to Palestinian children—capturing, in that instant, an agony beyond politics:
