Israel Shot And killed This 9-Year-Old Palestinian Girl In A Makeshift School In Gaza In Front Of Her Classmates
“We suddenly heard the students screaming, so we rushed to the tent to find Ritaj lying face down, blood gushing from her mouth."
Israel has killed 9-year-old Palestinian girl Ritaj Rihan while she was sitting in her class in a makeshift school in north Gaza, shooting her in the head in front of about 40 other children.
On Wednesday, April 9, Ritaj was practicing the subtraction of four-digit numbers during a math lesson when she suddenly got shot and collapsed in front of her classmates.
The school is in a relatively safe area in northern Gaza, about 2km from the so-called "Yellow Line," an Israeli-imposed invisible border cutting the Gaza Strip roughly in half, leaving more than 50% of Gaza under Israel’s control as part of the “ceasefire,” according to Middle East Eye.
The shot came from the east, the direction of an Israeli military position near the "Yellow Line."
“We suddenly heard the students screaming, so we rushed to the tent to find Ritaj lying face down, blood gushing from her mouth." Ritaj’s teacher said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education in Gaza said her classmates were left in severe psychological shock.
"Every day, I take my daughter to school so she can learn like any other child in the world. Today, about an hour after I dropped her off, I received the news that my daughter had been killed." Ritaj's father Abdulrahman Rihan said, according to the Electronic Intifada.
"We were happy she had grown up enough and remained alive and healthy after two years of war to carry a school bag and notebooks," he said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education in Gaza called the killing a "gruesome and shocking crime," and said it was not an isolated incident but part of a sustained pattern of attacks on the education sector over more than two and a half years of ongoing Israel’s genocide.
Under international humanitarian law (IHL), deliberately attacking civilians or civilian objects, including schools, is a war crime.
Since Oct. 10, Israel has violated the "ceasefire" in Gaza over 2,073 times, killing more than 750 people, many of whom are children.
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