Israel Bombs Gaza School With U.S.-Made Missile During Friday Prayers
The school was sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza City.
GAZA CITY—An Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza City sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians on Friday killed at least 5 people and wounded 22, including several children. The attack came as Israel is under increasing international scrutiny and criticism for the outright famine it has pushed Gaza into, with scores of adults and children dying of hunger and malnutrition in the past few days alone.
Israel attacked the Cairo Elementary School for Girls in central Gaza City just as people had gathered in the school yard for Friday prayers, according to multiple eyewitnesses. Many of the displaced in the school are from areas in northern Beit Hanoun, which has been nearly completely destroyed and emptied by the Israeli military. So far, Israel has not published even a perfunctory justification for the strike and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions submitted by Drop Site about the attack.
“During Friday prayers, they bombed the school with the worshippers inside,” Ibrahim Abu Amsh, an eyewitness told Drop Site at the scene. “Most of the injured were children—defenseless, hungry children. All of them were in a state of exhaustion, unable even to stand—they probably hadn’t slept all night due to hunger.”
The Cairo Elementary School for Girls in Gaza City the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike. July 25, 2025. Shot by Abdel Qader Sabbah.
Dead bodies lay in the hallways, some ripped apart and limbs torn off. People fled the building in panic carrying children and few belongings. Blood covered the walls and floors. People lifted the dead and wounded, some badly burnt, to ambulances outside using blankets. At least one baby was among the dead, with the left side of its body blown off and flesh torn apart, being carried outside by emergency medical worker Omar Abu Mohsen.
“The school is full of displaced people—full of children, of women, of men, and of the elderly. The enemy is merciless,” Abu Mohsen said. “This is an enemy that seeks the extermination of the Palestinian people.”
Remnants of the munition photographed at the scene were identified as the rocket motor portion of a U.S.-manufactured Hellfire missile, according to a weapons expert who reviewed the footage.
“The lot number indicates it was made by Lockheed Martin in 2012,” Trevor Ball, a munitions researcher and a former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal specialist, told Drop Site, who added that the specific designation was AGM-114K-2. “It is a precision weapon so it would hit where aimed unless there was a malfunction of some kind,” Ball said. “This specific variant features a fragmentation sleeve which increases the fragmentation generated by the munition to more effectively kill or injure people in its area of effect.”
Israel’s continued military assault on Gaza kills scores of Palestinians across the enclave on a daily basis. At least 89 were killed over the past 24 hours, according to the ministry of health. This follows 89 killed on Thursday. 113 on Wednesday. 77 on Tuesday. 134 on Monday.
“Isn't it enough that they’ve starved us to death? Isn't it enough that they’ve slaughtered us?” Zainab Adwan, who was displaced from Beit Hanoun and sheltering at the school, said. “The Israelis can’t confront the resistance. If they were real men, they would go face the resistance fighters at the borders. There are no fighters here. Where are the resistance fighters? These are just civilians.”
Friday’s attack came as Israel’s campaign of forced starvation in Gaza has reached a tipping point into rapidly increasing cases of death. Over the past five days alone, at least 54 Palestinians have died, including over 20 children, as a result of starvation and malnutrition, according to the Ministry of Health. The widening famine is affecting the entire population in Gaza. People are arriving at emergency rooms in a state of exhaustion, hunger and dehydration. Doctors and journalists who care and report on the famine are themselves weakened and struggling to work. Hospitals have run out of key treatments and medicines to urgently treat the ballooning cases of malnutrition.
Starting on March 2, Israel cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine, and other aid to Gaza. In late May, it allowed in a trickle of aid through a system largely overseen by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The meager amount of food allowed in was only accessible at four distribution hubs located in militarized zones where Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries have shot and shelled at starving crowds killing over a thousand aid seekers in less than two months. In the face of increasing criticism, Israel is now trying to pin the blame for the spreading famine on the United Nations, claiming it is refusing to distribute aid even though Israel has actively prevented it from doing so.
On Friday, Israel said it would soon allow other countries to drop aid from the air into the Gaza Strip. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are expected to begin airdrops in the coming days. Aid drops have taken place a number of times in Gaza over the past 21 months, and have not resulted in sufficient amounts of aid reaching Palestinians, and have also led to death and injuries multiple times.
“Airdrops are the most expensive & inefficient way to deliver aid. It is a distraction to the inaction,” Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, said in a social media post. “Today, more children died, their bodies emaciated by hunger. The flawed distribution system (GHF) is not designed to address the humanitarian crisis. It’s serving military & political objectives. It’s cruel as it takes more lives than it saves lives. Israel controls all aspects of humanitarian access, whether outside or within Gaza.”
Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.
 | A guest post by
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I am 81, a retired professor of U.S. history. I have never in my life seen anything on a par with Israel's well documented genocide in Gaza. All my ancestors are Jewish; thus I am not antisemitic. The Zionists' treatment of the Palestinians has been a horror since well before their state was created in 1948. As a result of the Nazi Holocaust, the Israelis have had an unbounded sense of entitlement. It has never been the Palestinians who are the source of their troubles. Quite the contrary. They have continuously massacred Palestinians since they, European Jews, began going to Israel in sizable numbers in the early twentieth century. They are a settler colonial country, as is the US. Settler colonialism invariably displaces native peoples. Since the Zionist state is small, about the size of New Jersey, they have always used wars for purpose of expansion. For that purpose they call on their fellow settler colonial state, the US to be a continuous source of money and weapons. Over the decades they have stolen much land and hundreds of thousands of dwellings, farms, and orchards from the Palestinians, a people who has been there for thousands of years. When the Palestinians resist, as they did on October 7, 2023, it gives the Zionist state an excuse to conduct periodic wars, which they refer to as "mowing the lawn." Their attitude towards the Palestinians is sociopathic, that is without conscience. Most of them view Palestinians as a lower and thus expendable form of life. Over the years the Zionists' government has gone further and further to the right. Likud, together with parties even further to the right, that have been in power for some thirty years, will never agree to a two state solution. That is a myth that Jewish and gentile liberals like to believe. The Zionists have now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they purpose to take all the land and either kill or permanently exile all the Palestinians. And the vast majority of genocide scholars worldwide agree that the Zionist state is now perpetrating a genocide, their own version of the Nazi holocaust.
Go to hell Israel. I just don’t know how else to say it.