Germany justifies Israel’s attack on Gaza school as ‘self-defense’

Germany has justified Israel’s recent attack on the Al-Tabiin school in Gaza, which killed nearly 100 Palestinians during morning prayers, saying Israel has the “right to defend itself.” Palestinian survivors of the attack described how men, women and children sheltering in the school were blown to pieces after Israel hit it with three separate bombings on Saturday.

Videos of the aftermath show Palestinians searching the damaged school while collecting body parts of victims. “In the hellish scene, body parts were scattered among the rubble, and charred and bloodied bodies lay on the wreckage of the two-story compound,” AFP wrote.

Gaza’s civil defense agency said at least 93 people were killed, 17 of them women and children, in one of the worst massacres Israel has committed since the war began. “Israel has the right to defend itself. The reality is that Hamas uses schools, hospitals and kindergartens as command centers, and that people in the Gaza Strip are also used against their will as human shields,” German deputy government spokesman Wolfgang Buechner told a news conference in Berlin. Buechner did not provide any evidence for his claims.

“This is also a sad reality in this situation, and I think one must be very careful in relying on one-sided reports distributed by Hamas and believing everything that is propagated by that side,” he added.

Amid the criticism, the Israeli military falsely claimed that more than a dozen of the more than 100 civilians massacred in its attack on the Gaza school on August 10 were “terrorist agents” belonging to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement. Other world leaders, including EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, have strongly condemned Israel for the horrific attack.

“Horrified by the images of a school used as a shelter in Gaza hit by an Israeli attack, with allegedly dozens of Palestinian victims,” Borrell wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

The Washington Post noted in August: “More than ten months of relentless Israeli bombardment have led to the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, tens of thousands missing, much of Gaza destroyed, the spread of disease and famine-like conditions in parts of the territory.”

Via News Agencies