IDF pounds Gaza targets, with one strike said to kill at least 29
Military says attack on residential building in northern Strip’s Shejaiya, which reportedly killed dozens, targeted a senior Hamas terrorist
The military said Wednesday that it carried out more than 45 airstrikes across the Gaza Strip over the previous day, including one on a residential building in the Shejaiya area of northern Gaza that reportedly killed at least 29 people.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, the targets included weapons manufacturing sites, primed rocket launchers, buildings used by terror groups, weapon depots and cells of terror operatives.
Wednesday’s airstrikes took place as IDF ground forces continued to operate in the Strip, the military added.
In the Tel Sultan area in southern Gaza’s Rafah, the IDF said troops of the Gaza Division located several tunnel shafts.
Nearby, between Rafah and Khan Younis, the military said that the 36th Division had advanced into the Morag Corridor area, a new east-west route that the IDF is forging between the two major southern Gaza cities.
The IDF statement said that troops located and destroyed several buildings and other infrastructure used by Hamas, along with tunnels, and killed several operatives.
In northern Gaza, the IDF said the 252nd Division had begun advancing into Gaza City’s eastern Shejaiya neighborhood, where the military said troops killed several operatives in the past day, including by directing airstrikes.
One such airstrike in Shejaiya killed at least 29 people on Wednesday, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defense agency.
The military said in a statement that it struck a senior Hamas terrorist — whom it did not identify — responsible for planning and executing attacks from Shejaiya in northern Gaza, adding that several steps were taken before the attack to mitigate harm to civilians.
Last week, the military ordered Shejaiya residents to evacuate, saying forces intended to operate against terrorists in the area.
The retrieval of bodies of missing Palestinians continues under the rubble of a residential block that was bombed by the Israeli occupation forces on Baghdad Street in the Shujaiya neighborhood, east of Gaza City. pic.twitter.com/FRQS8l28DB
— Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) April 9, 2025
Ayub Salim, a 26-year-old Shejaiya resident, told AFP he witnessed the strike on the four-story residential building, saying it was hit with “multiple missiles” and was “overcrowded with tents, displaced people and homes.”
“Shrapnel flew in all directions,” he said, “dust and massive destruction filled the entire place, we couldn’t see anything, just the screams and panic of the people.”
Salim said the dead were “torn to pieces.”
“Even now, emergency crews are still transporting the dead and the injured. It is truly a horrific massacre,” he said. “Civil defense teams are struggling to retrieve them all.”
Local health authorities said nine other Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli military strikes in other parts of the enclave, raising Wednesday’s death toll to 38.
Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its unverified figures, said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846.
Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The war in Gaza was sparked by the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre in southern Israel, in which roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, and 251 were seized as hostages.
Fifty-nine of the 251 hostages remain in captivity, of whom 24 are still alive, according to Israeli intelligence assessments. Over 100 hostages were released during a weeklong truce in November 2023, and during the recent ceasefire, Hamas released 30 living hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives.
