Israel targets top Hamas commander in Gaza attack that killed dozens

Israel says it targeted Hamas’ top military official, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike in southern Gaza on Saturday (13) that local authorities said killed at least 71 Palestinians.

Deif – the leader of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades – was targeted in an intelligence-based airstrike on Al-Mawasi, a camp west of the town of Khan Younis, an Israeli security official told CNN .

The Israeli military said it was verifying whether Deif had been killed in the attack. Deif was targeted alongside Khan Younis brigade chief Rafe Salama, the security official added.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry reported at least 71 people killed in the same area of ​​Al-Mawasi in Israeli strikes, with nearly 300 people wounded. The strikes hit an area where displaced people were sheltering, the ministry said.

Videos from the scene show residents and rescue teams trying to dig out several people still trapped.

Al-Mawasi has been designated by Israel as a safe zone for Palestinians fleeing fighting in Gaza. Kuwait and Nasser hospitals are now struggling to cope with the high number of dead and wounded civilians, the ministry said.

Hamas has denied Israeli allegations that Deif and Salama were targeted, calling the killings a “horrific massacre.”

“The occupation’s claims that it targeted leaders are false, and this is not the first time the occupation has claimed to target Palestinian leaders only for its lies to be exposed later,” a statement from the group said.

Little information is known about Mohammed Deif. The leader, believed to have been born in the 1960s, is a bomb maker who was behind a wave of four suicide bombings in 1996 that killed 65 people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as other attacks aimed at derailing the peace process.

His full name is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, but he became known as El Deif (the Guest) because for decades he stayed in different houses every night to avoid being tracked down and killed by Israel.

(Reporting by Abeer Salman, Ibrahim Dahman, Niamh Kennedy, Benjamin Brown, Sophie Tanno and Jeremy Diamond)