Germany says Israel's massacre at Gaza school justified in 'self defense'
Israel fired three US-made munitions at the Al-Tabiin school, slaughtering 93 Palestinians as they gathered for morning prayers
Germany justified Israel's recent strike on the Al-Tabiin school in Gaza, which killed almost 100 Palestinians during morning prayers, saying that Israel has the "right to defend itself."
Palestinian survivors of the attack described how men, women, and children sheltering at the school were torn to pieces after Israel targeted it with three separate strikes on Saturday.
Videos of the aftermath show Palestinians sifting through the damaged school while collecting body parts of the victims.
"In the hellish aftermath, body parts were strewn around the rubble and charred, bloodied bodies slumped in the wreckage of the two-story complex," AFP wrote.
Gaza's civil defense agency said at least 93 people were killed, 17 of them women and children, in one of Israel's largest massacres since the start of the war.
"Israel has the right to defend itself. The reality is that Hamas uses schools, hospitals, kindergartens as command centers and that the people in the Gaza Strip are also abused against their will as protective (human) shields," government deputy spokesman Wolfgang Buechner claimed while speaking the press in Berlin.
Buechner provided no proof of his assertions.
"That is also a sad reality in this situation and I think you have to be very careful about sitting on one-sided reports that are distributed by Hamas and believing everything that is spread by this side," he further claimed.
Amid the criticism, the Israeli army falsely claimed that over a dozen out of more than 100 civilians massacred in its strike on a Gaza school on 10 August were “terror operatives” belonging to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement.
Other world leaders, including EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, strongly condemned Israel for the horrific attack.
"Horrified by images from a sheltering school in Gaza hit by an Israeli strike, with reportedly dozens of Palestinian victims," Borrell wrote on X.
The Washington Post noted in August, "More than ten months of relentless Israeli bombardment have led to almost 40,000 people killed, tens of thousands more missing, much of Gaza flattened, disease spreading and famine conditions in parts of the territory."