According to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza, at least 71 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a designated humanitarian area, the Han Younis refugee camp, on Saturday, which Israel said targeted senior Hamas leaders. BBCAccording to the statement issued by the ministry, 289 people were injured in the attack.
Saturday's airstrike hit the Mawasi area, which the Israeli military has designated as a humanitarian zone, urging Palestinians to seek shelter there. Israel said the attack targeted Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas's military wing and the Israeli military's main target, and took place in an open area where there were no civilians. The BBC has analysed footage of the attack and confirmed that the airstrike did hit a location marked as a humanitarian zone on the Israeli military's website.
Early Saturday afternoon, the Israeli military also confirmed that the target of the attack was Mohammed Deif, who was also involved in planning the series of attacks on October 7. It was not confirmed whether the attack took place within the designated security zone and whether the hostages taken in the Israeli attack on October 7 were in the area.
An Israeli military official said that Rafi Salama, the Hamas commander in Khan Younis, was also targeted in the strike, adding that “precise intelligence” had been gathered before the “precision strike.”
According to Hamas, the claim that the targets were its leaders is false.
The organization said in a statement: “This is not the first time that Israel has claimed that it is targeting Palestinian leaders, only to later prove that this claim is false.”
The Israeli occupation army called on all residents of Gaza City on Wednesday to evacuate to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, amid an escalation in operations in the north. An eyewitness said the scene looked like an earthquake. Mohammed Abu Rayya, a doctor at the hospital dealing with the aftermath of the attack, told the BBC that it was a “black day”, with most of the wounded arriving dead while others were seriously injured. On Saturday afternoon, Naser Hospital in Han Gunesh announced that it could not receive any more patients due to the high number of wounded arriving at the hospital.
One of Israel's most wanted men was targeted.
Mohammed Deif, the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing, is one of Israel's most wanted men. He has gained popularity in Gaza after escaping arrest and surviving several assassination attempts, including losing an eye in an attack in 2002.
Israel accuses him of planning and supervising bus bombings that killed Israelis in 1996, and of involvement in the capture and killing of three Israeli soldiers in the mid-1990s.
He is believed to have been one of the masterminds of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages to Gaza.
There was no information available on whether the two targets were among the casualties, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to hold a briefing on the details of the attack.
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