IDF says it killed Hamas spymaster in Gaza City, Palestinian trying to cross border

A Palestinian man who attempted to cross the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip Thursday evening was killed in a drone strike, the IDF said.

According to the military, soldiers monitoring surveillance cameras spotted the suspect approaching Israel’s border barrier from the southern part of the Strip.

Troops were dispatched to the scene, and the suspect began to flee back to Gaza. A short while later, he was struck by a drone and killed, the IDF said.

It said the suspect did not cross the barrier amid the incident.

The military did not say if the suspect was armed, nor elaborate as to why he was killed while fleeing back to Gaza.

The incident came just over a month after an Israeli soldier was killed in a clash with Hamas terrorists who attempted to infiltrate Israel from southern Gaza.

These events were among the few attempted infiltrations into Israel since the war in the Gaza Strip began on October 7, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst into southern Israel under the cover of thousands of rockets.

IDF strikes UNRWA site used by Hamas

Earlier Thursday, the IDF said a group of Hamas operatives gathered at a United Nations facility in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood was struck by a fighter jet.

According to the military, the UNRWA site was used by Hamas as a command center.

The IDF said it carried out “many steps” to mitigate harm to civilians, including using aerial surveillance and “precision munitions.”

In an update Friday, the IDF and Shin Bet said among those killed in the strike was the intelligence officer of Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade.

Hamdiya served in the role of chief of intelligence in the brigade since 2019, and was responsible for collecting intelligence on Israel ahead of the October 7 onslaught, according to the IDF and Shin Bet.

Amid the war, Hamdiya directed Hamas attacks against IDF troops in Gaza, and worked to collect intelligence on Israel’s ground maneuver, according to the military.

In recent weeks, more than 50 airstrikes have been carried out against Hamas sites embedded within schools and other sites used as shelters for civilians, according to the IDF.

In Rafah, residents said Israeli tanks advanced deeper into the western side of the city and took position on a hilltop there. The Israeli military said forces located several tunnels and killed several gunmen.

At Al-Amal Hospital, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Palestinian health officials exhumed at least 12 bodies buried inside the medical facility to rebury them at another location.

Reuters journalists saw medical workers digging up bodies from graves inside the facility, wrapping them in white shrouds before placing them inside vehicles for transfer to a new burial site as relatives watched, some in tears.

Areej Hamouda, a mother of one of the dead, clutched some of the sandy earth from the grave of her son and kissed it before medics exhumed the body.

“They (Israel) shot him and he had a loaf of bread with him, which he had to beg for to get for his daughter, they shot him in the eye and the head — it rained on him, he was washed with blood,” Hamouda said, weeping.

“He was (lying) there all day long, they weren’t able to move him, (then) they pulled him with a rope when they brought him to be buried here.”

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.

Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 327.