Dozens of Palestinians, including children, with severe injuries and burns were transferred to nearby hospitals after an Israeli airstrike on the Rafidah school-turned-shelter in central Gaza killed at least 28 people Thursday, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

CNN footage showed children being carried into ambulances, their faces covered with blood, and many of them screaming and crying. One girl lay on the hospital floor, wearing only underpants, shaking and covered in blood, with severe burns on her body.

The Israeli military told CNN it struck “terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center” at the school compound. CNN cannot independently verify the statement.

The strike tore down the walls of the school, covering its rooms with blackened debris. Responders and survivors dug through the wreckage trying to recover bodies.

Ayman Abou Khousa, a displaced Palestinian who was sheltering at the school, said the attack came “by surprise.”

“We are dying every day,” he told CNN. “The world has sold us out… every day you (journalists) come here and film us. You’ve been filming us for a year.”

Another man said that survivors are looking for their relatives “in pieces.”

“Why are they hitting the school? It is all displaced people, mostly women,” Iftekhar Hammouda, another woman who was sheltering at the school, said, adding that “there is no Hamas” there.

“Where can people go? Where do they flee? They hit us at our homes, at our tents, on the streets and at the schools.”