Israel attacked the southern and central parts Gaza Strip A special operation was launched on Monday to put more pressure on Hamas, targeting the terror group’s leadership following a weekend attack that killed a large number of Palestinians camping in a designated “safe zone.”
Two days after the Israeli attack turned the crowded neighbourhood of Mawasi near the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland littered with burning cars and mutilated bodies, displaced survivors said they did not know where to go now.
“Those moments when the ground was shaking beneath my feet and the dust and sand was rising to the sky and I saw mutilated bodies — I had never seen anything like that before in my life,” said Aya Mohammed, 30, a vendor in Mwasi who was contacted via mobile message.
“Everybody asks where to go, and nobody has the answer.”
Mawasis, on the western outskirts of Khan Yunis, have sheltered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared it a safe zone. Israel said its strike on Saturday targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, a mastermind of the October 7 attacks on Israeli towns and villages that sparked the Gaza war.
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Palestinian officials say at least 90 people were killed and hundreds wounded on Saturday. Reuters reporters at the scene filmed the carnage, with locals carrying away the wounded and dead amid fire and smoke.
In Rafah in the south, the main focus of the Israeli advance since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday. They said Israeli forces blew up several houses in the western and central parts of the city. Medical officials said they had recovered the bodies of 10 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the city’s eastern neighbourhoods, some of which had already begun to decompose.
The army also stepped up air and tank shelling of the al-Bureij and al-Maghazi historic refugee camps in central Gaza. Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Magazi camp, health officials said.
The Israeli military said the air force struck dozens of Palestinian military positions in Gaza, killing several gunmen. It said the army killed gunmen in Rafah and central Gaza, sometimes in close combat.
A statement issued by the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad militant group, said its fighters were engaged in fierce fighting in the Yibna camp in Rafah.
The massacre in Mawasi on Saturday, one of the deadliest Israeli attacks of the war, has hit talks that both sides had previously described as the closest thing to a permanent ceasefire. A senior Hamas official said on Sunday that the group had not pulled out of the talks despite the Mawasi attack.
Israel says another senior commander was killed in the attack but has not yet confirmed Deif’s death. Hamas officials have denied that Deif was killed.
The Gaza Health Ministry has said at least 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military offensives since October 7. It does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, but officials say the majority of those who have died during the war are civilians.
Israel says 326 of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza and at least a third of the dead are Palestinian fighters.
According to Israeli officials, the war began on October 7 after a Hamas-led attack inside Israel in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostages in Gaza.
