Israel apparently kills Hamas commander – lawyer warns military

The Israeli army says it has killed a commander of the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip who is said to have been a key player in the terrorist attack on Israel’s border towns on October 7, 2023. The commander of the Hamas elite unit “Nuchba” in Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip was killed in the humanitarian zone there. He was one of the leaders of the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the terrorists committed particularly terrible atrocities on October 7th.

Since then, the commander, who has now been killed in Khan Yunis, has led numerous attacks on Israel’s troops, the army said. Before the drone attack on him in a designated humanitarian zone, various measures were taken to limit damage to civilians. The army’s information could not initially be independently verified.

Meanwhile, according to a media report, Israel’s top military lawyer warned in a letter that the army sometimes underestimates the number of civilians in certain areas when carrying out attacks in the Gaza Strip. More caution is necessary to ensure that no bystanders are killed, wrote Major General Jifat Tomer-Jeruschalmi in a strongly worded letter to the commander in charge, Jaron Finkelman, according to the army broadcaster.

The army radio station reported that around 14,000 civilians had fled Beit Lahia in the north of the Gaza Strip. The military had previously only expected 3,000 people in the area. This means that the army may not be able to correctly estimate the number of civilians before attacks in certain parts of the coastal strip. Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi ordered an independent investigation into the letter, the station reported.

Terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups killed more than 1,200 people in Israel in the massacre and kidnapped around 250 others as hostages to Gaza. The unprecedented attack on the Jewish state triggered the Gaza War.

Most recently, the Islamist Hamas fired rockets from the embattled Gaza Strip into Israel on New Year’s Eve. The Israeli army said two projectiles were fired from the center of the sealed-off coastal strip at the southern Israeli town of Netivot. One rocket was intercepted and the other hit an open area. There were no reports of injuries. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. Shortly before, the warning sirens had sounded again in Israel.

The Israeli army is currently taking massive action against Hamas in the north of the Gaza Strip. Militant Palestinians have also repeatedly fired rockets from there into the Israeli border area in recent days.

The military also said that a workshop for the production of rockets and weapons was discovered and destroyed during an operation in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip. The troops also found medium- and longer-range missiles there. During the operations within a month, “terrorists were eliminated and terrorist Hamas infrastructure was destroyed,” it said.