IDF says it killed Shejaiya battalion deputy chief, found Hamas command room at UNRWA site
Ayman Shweidah killed alongside 2nd seasoned commander, says army; troops find weapons cache, room used to observe Israeli troops at UN compound; Hamas says dozens found in rubble
Ayman Shweidah, the deputy commander of Hamas’s Shejaiya Battalion, was killed in a recent airstrike on Gaza City, the Israel Defense Forces announced on Friday, as troops raided an UNRWA facility in the area that the army said was used by the terror group as a command center.
According to the IDF, Shweidah had carried out numerous attacks on troops in Gaza, and was involved in planning in executing the October 7 onslaught, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.
One of the Shejaiya Battalion’s company commanders, Ubadah Abu Hain, was also killed in the strike, the IDF said, describing him as a seasoned and prominent commander who had taken a significant part in the fighting.
Meanwhile, several rockets were fired on Friday from northern Gaza’s Beit Hanoun at the Lachish Regional Council area in southern Israel yesterday, setting off sirens in the town of Nir Israel, near Ashkelon.
The IDF said the rockets struck open areas, and in response, airstrikes were carried out against sites belonging to terror groups in the area of the launch.
Palestinian media reported that an airstrike on central Gaza’s Nuseirat killed at least three people. Another airstrike on Khan Younis, in the Strip’s south, was said to have killed four aid workers.
Elsewhere in the Strip’s south, the IDF said soldiers with the 162nd Division had killed numerous gunmen in Rafah in clashes and by calling in airstrikes.
Troops from the IDF’s Commando Brigade have located weapons and a command room used by Hamas at UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City, the army said on Friday.
The troops had raided the compound earlier this week as part of a new operation carried out by the 99th Division in western and southern neighborhoods of Gaza City.
The UNRWA headquarters had not been in use in recent months. The IDF raided the compound earlier this year, discovering a major Hamas tunnel network that passed beneath it.
In the latest operation, the IDF said the commandos captured Hamas operatives who attempted to flee the UNRWA headquarters.
The commandos also battled with cells of gunmen who were holed up inside the facility, the army said.
Inside, the army said that Commando Brigade troops found a command room used to observe Israeli forces.
The troops were also said to find parts of a Hamas drone as well as dozens of weapons, including rockets, machine guns, mortars, explosive devices, grenades and bomb-dropping drones.
Israel has long accused UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, of funneling money into Hamas’s coffers and letting the terror group use the agency’s facilities.
Israel has also accused the aid agency of employing people who are active members of Hamas and other Gaza-based terror groups. On Thursday, it was reported that Jerusalem had sent UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini a letter listing 108 employees of the agency who Israel says are Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, demanding that they immediately be fired.
Previous Israeli allegations that UNRWA was employing terrorists led several countries to defund the agency. However, the allegations have not been independently corroborated.
At a university building near the UNRWA headquarters, commandos located several weapons and an underground bomb-making lab, the army said on Friday.
Elsewhere in Gaza City, the IDF said troops with the 99th Division also located lathes used to manufacture weapons, along with cash belonging to terror groups. The troops also killed several gunmen, the army said.
The Gaza City raids came as the 98th Division on Wednesday wrapped up a two-week raid in the city’s eastern neighborhood of Shejaiya. The IDF said Hamas had regrouped in the neighborhood after previous offensives there.
During the operation, troops killed more than 150 terror operatives and demolished eight tunnels, the army said.
Israel had warned virtually all of Gaza City that it was now a “dangerous” combat zone.
The Hamas-run Gaza civil defense agency said on Friday that some 85% of Shejaiya’s buildings were destroyed in the latest operation there.
The agency said that it had recovered at least 100 bodies amid the rubble in Gaza City over the past week, as Israel has been withdrawing.
“There are bodies scattered in the streets, dismembered bodies, there are bodies of entire families, there are also bodies inside a home of an entire family that was completely burned,” spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said on Friday in comments carried by Hamas media.
The terror group’s figures cannot be confirmed and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Meanwhile, in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, Hamas media said four people working for the Al-Khair Foundation, a Muslim non-profit based in Britain and Turkey, were killed in an airstrike at an aid distribution center.
Hours later, the IDF named one of those killed in the strike as Hossam Mansour, who it said was a head of a department in Hamas’s internal security forces in the Gaza Strip.
According to the IDF, Mansour “took a significant and continuous part in the preservation and presence of Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, while undermining Israel’s efforts in the region,” and also served in the terror group’s military wing.
Mansour was a director of al-Khair, which the IDF charged transferred funds to terror groups in Gaza “under the guise of humanitarian activity.”
