Hamas announced Saturday that 90 Palestinians had been killed in an Israeli strike on a displacement camp in the southern Gaza Strip, revising upwards an initial toll, in an area where Israel said it had targeted the head of the Islamist movement’s armed wing.
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In a statement, the ministry denounced “a heinous massacre by the occupation [Israël, NDLR]”, reporting 90 dead, “half of whom were women and children,” and 300 injured.
He had initially reported more than 71 dead and 289 injured.
The area of al-Mawasi, on the coast between Rafah and Khan Younis, had been declared a “humanitarian zone” by Israel, in theory safe for the displaced.
AFP
Without specifying whether the two men were dead, the Israeli army confirmed that it had targeted the head of the armed wing of Hamas, Mohammed Deif, and Rafa Salama, commander of the Khan Younis brigade, “who were two masterminds of the October 7 massacre.”
“The strike was carried out in a fenced area run by Hamas and where, according to our information, only Hamas terrorists were present and there were no civilians,” it said in a statement.
“This was a precise strike. It is estimated that most of the victims are also terrorists who were with Deif and Salama,” the army said.
Head of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, Mohammed Deif is one of Israel’s most wanted people.
AFP
Hamas said the Israeli allegations were aimed “at masking the scale of the horrific massacre.”
“This is not the first time that the occupation [Israël] claims to have targeted Palestinian leaders, before this was proven false,” Hamas said in a statement.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recalled that Benjamin Netanyahu had “given, at the beginning of the war, a permanent instruction to eliminate the senior leaders of Hamas.”
He “has been briefed on developments” and “will make an assessment of the situation today [samedi]” with security officials, according to his office.
“Many bodies scattered”
In the al-Mawasi area, “there are still many bodies of martyrs scattered in the streets, under the rubble and around the tents of displaced people that cannot be reached due to the intense gunfire of the occupation,” reported Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the Civil Defense, considering that it was a “new massacre.”
AFP
The victims were transferred to several hospitals in the region.
At Kuwait’s Rafah hospital, director Suhaib al-Hams said most of the injuries were serious, including amputations.
He called the situation “a real disaster that comes in the midst of the collapse of the health system,” according to a statement.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, estimates that around 1.5 million people are in the al-Mawasi area, in Khan Younis and Rafah, a spokeswoman told AFP.
This past week, four schools sheltering displaced people were targeted by strikes in four days, killing at least 49 people, according to sources in Gaza including Hamas. Israel had said it was targeting “terrorists.”
The war, now in its tenth month, broke out on October 7 after an unprecedented attack by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza into southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.
In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and launched an offensive that has killed at least 38,443 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run Gaza government’s health ministry.