A Palestinian man carries a child wounded in an Israeli strike on a compound housing a UN school in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, into the emergency room of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, on July 24, 2014.
For more than a week, as the war engulfed their homes, families in this northern Gaza town packed up their belongings and children and headed to the one place they presumed would remain safe: the United Nations school.
But in the last few days, the war approached there as well. The Israeli military warned on Monday that the shelter should be evacuated. By Thursday, the U.N. had decided to withdraw its staff and to stop providing food.
Then, as the Palestinians gathered in the courtyard on Thursday, believing they were about to be bused elsewhere, blasts tore through the crowd, killing 16 people and sending scores of wounded, mostly women and children, streaming into local hospitals.
The source of the blasts remained unclear, setting off recriminations between Israelis and Palestinians over which side was responsible. People in the school reported from three to five blasts and accused Israel of shelling them. Israel suggested that rockets fired by militants might have fallen short of their targets or that the school may have been hit with errant shells from either side in fighting nearby. The U.N. said it could not confirm the source of the blasts.
The shelling came on the 17th day of an increasingly bloody conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants that has killed nearly 800 people in Gaza. On the Israeli side, 32 soldiers and three civilians have been killed.
This was the fourth time that U.N. schools had been struck.
The blasts in Beit Hanoun highlighted the desperate search by Gaza civilians to find refuge. It also came as Secretary of State John Kerry was pushing intensively to achieve a cease-fire. One proposal under discussion, according to an official involved, was for a seven-day pause that could begin on Sunday.
"We went to the school to be safe," said Mohammed Shinbary, kneeling on the floor of a hospital here and cradling his wounded 7-year-old daughter Aya. "And then they hit the school."
This particular school is run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA for short, which provides services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. But Gaza's unique makeup gives UNRWA an outsize role in the small, coastal enclave.
"We are the only constant in Gaza," said Robert Turner, UNRWA's director for Gaza.
Gazans call it simply "the agency."
It is this long relationship, Turner said, that has led 150,000 Gazans - more than 8 percent of the population - to seek refuge from the war in UNRWA's schools.
The attack Thursday came after both the U.N. and Israel realized that those sheltering in the school were in danger but before they could be moved elsewhere.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said Israel had asked the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday to evacuate the school because both Palestinian militants and the Israeli army were active nearby. Word came Thursday that an evacuation was being prepared, he said, but the school was hit soon after.
Lerner said Israeli troops did not aim at the school but that fighting was raging nearby and several rockets launched at Israel had fallen short and landed in the area. "There was combat there and we have to determine whether it has anything to do with us," he said.
Turner said his office had told Israel that hundreds of people were sheltering in the school and provided its coordinates - 12 times - most recently at 10:56 a.m. Thursday. He said it was the only shelter in Beit Hanoun where the agency was still providing services, after others had been deemed too dangerous, and that the Israeli warnings had made the U.N. decide to withdraw its staff and tell the Gazans it was no longer safe.
Turner said the U.N. had not confirmed the source of the blasts. He added that in the earlier instances when schools had been hit, he was "certain" that Israel was responsible.
But an Israeli official who coordinates with international organizations said this week that he had provided military commanders with coordinates of 523 sensitive sites to avoid. He showed reporters a graphic with dates and times of rockets being launched from several such sites - including a mosque, a hospital and a playground - in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.
"It's easy to blame us. 'Why are you hitting that hospital?' Why not blame them? Why are you launching from those sensitive places?" said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity under military rules.
Jacques De Maio, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation for Israel and the Occupied Territories, called the situation in Beit Hanoun a "conundrum" where "you have civilians and military targets that are simply too close to each other."
He denied that the Red Cross had been involved in any planned evacuation.
Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza and is leading the fight for the Palestinians, blamed Israel or striking the school, calling it "an ugly war crime."
Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, who was in the region this week to try to advance cease-fire efforts and met with Kerry, said in a statement that he was "appalled" by the school attack.
"Many have been killed - including women and children, as well as U.N. staff," he said, adding that staff members had been trying throughout the day to arrange a pause in the hostilities so that civilians could be evacuated.
For those inside the school, the blasts punctuated days of steadily declining conditions.
As doctors scrambled to treat the scores of patients that flooded into the hospital closest to the blast, the wounded and their relatives pondered how they had lost so much in a place they had expected to be safe.
All denied that there had been Hamas fighters in the area.
"If the resistance had come to us, we would have died a long time ago," said Bilal Nassir, suggesting that the presence of militant groups would have brought an earlier Israeli assault.
"We had no resistance at all in the area."
In a hospital hallway, Amina Nassir stood over a single hospital gurney holding two of her daughters: Fatima, 13, had lost a chunk of flesh from her leg, and Aya, 12, who had broken her right shoulder and had shrapnel wounds in both legs. A third daughter had also been wounded.
Nassir said shelling near her home had caused her family to flee to the school eight days before. Many other families had come too, packing the classrooms, and as time went on, the shelling got closer and food and water grew scarce.
On Thursday, word came that buses were coming to transport everyone to a safer school, she said, so they gathered their things and collected in the courtyard, where they were when the blasts struck.
Like other survivors, she said there had been no Hamas fighters in area and seemed shocked that her family had been harmed inside the school.
"I don't know where we can go now," Nassir said. "We can't go home and the schools are unsafe."