Al Qaeda couldn’t shut down the American International School in Gaza, and neither could Hamas militants. But the Israelis finally pulled it off for them. After American-built bombers flattened the school, bulldozers and tanks moved in to destroy the basketball court and the jungle gym.

As school officials search for a temporary campus for their 230 students, the loss has stunned many Gazans. If any place should have been safe from Israel’s war on Hamas, they say, it was the school, which for years flew an American flag over the main gate and whose graduates attend top universities in the United States, Canada and the Middle East.

Yet of the 25 schools and hospitals that Israeli forces hit during the 22-day war, according to a tally by Palestinian officials, only the American International School was destroyed. Days after the airstrike, Israeli bulldozers and tanks returned to the campus and plowed over the basketball court and the jungle gym, school officials and residents said…

“It’s an iconic example of the disconnect between Israeli statements and the facts on the ground,” John Ging, the head of the U.N. refugee agency in Gaza, said of the school strike. “Israel said it was striking against the institutions of terrorism, but this is a school that was teaching an American curriculum in English. There has to be an answer for this and all the other destruction and death.”

Private funds and tuition fees finance the school, and the charge for high school, $5,000 a year, is the highest in Gaza. Thirty high-performing students from poor families receive scholarships, however, paid for in part by a $160,000 U.S. government grant.