Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee from southern city of Rafah in one of war’s biggest mass displacements

An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people, rescuers said, and hundreds of thousands in the Rafah area are fleeing in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s newly announced campaign to “divide up” the Gaza Strip.

Three missiles hit Dar al-Arqam school in al-Tuffah neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon, the civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said, killing several children and wounding 100 people.

Defence minister Israel Katz says seized land ‘will be added to the state of Israel’s security areas’

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Israel’s defence minister has said the country intends to “seize large areas” of the Gaza Strip amid a major expansion of aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Israel Katz said in a statement on Wednesday that “troops will move to clear areas of terrorists and infrastructure, and seize extensive territory that will be added to the state of Israel’s security areas”.

Alaa Abu Zeid only discovered his wife and children had been killed after his release from an Israeli prison. His is a story repeated across Gaza

• ‘They don’t want them to know anything’: Gaza civilians held in Israel not told families had been killed

More than a year after his abduction by Israeli soldiers, the first thing Alaa Abu Zeid wanted to do on his return to Gaza was hold his wife and children. He didn’t know that Ali, his brother, would be the only person waiting when he arrived in Khan Younis earlier this month: Alaa’s wife, Hala, and all five of the couple’s children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike last summer.

Abu Zeid, 48, the headteacher of a primary school funded by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) in Bureij in central Gaza, was arrested along with dozens of other men when Israeli troops raided the school turned shelter in December 2023. He would never see his family again.