Islamic Jihad terrorist who took part in October 7 assault killed in strike, IDF says
Army reports airstrikes hit over 200 targets in Gaza over weekend, including terrorist cells and weapons depots
Stav Levaton is a military reporter for The Times of Israel
An Israeli strike in Gaza killed a terrorist who took part in the October 7, 2023, invasion, the military said Monday, announcing hundreds of strikes on targets in the Palestinian enclave over the past three days.
The Israel Defense Forces did not detail when or where the strike that killed Ahmad Mansour took place, announcing the killing after Gazans said 43 people were killed in attacks on Friday.
According to the IDF, Mansour was a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group’s rocket unit. The army said he was among the thousands of terrorists who infiltrated southern Israel from Gaza on October 7.
During the Hamas-led attack, which included members of other terror groups, 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage, of whom 59 remain in captivity. Twenty-four are believed to be alive.
There was no immediate confirmation from PIJ, which has fired a number of rockets at Israel over the course of the war, though the Iran-backed group was considered to have a smaller arsenal than Hamas.
In March, PIJ claimed responsibility for two rockets that were launched at the city of Sderot in southern Israel.
The IDF also said Monday morning that the Israeli Air Force had struck over 200 targets over the last 72 hours, including terrorist cells, weapons depots, rocket launchpads, sniper outposts, and other structures used for terrorist activity.
The army said troops killed an unspecified number of terrorists during ground operations near the southern city of Rafah.
Additionally, the IDF said recent ground operations saw the dismantling of an “underground infrastructure site” in the northern Gaza Strip from which it identified terrorist activity, as well as several sniper posts that posed a threat to Israeli troops in the area.
Fighting in the Strip resumed in mid-March following the collapse of a two-month ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which saw the release of 33 hostages.
The army had faced relatively light resistance in the renewed offensive until Saturday, when the IDF announced that an Israeli soldier was killed and five others were wounded, three of them seriously, in a Hamas attack in northern Gaza.
The slain soldier was named as Warrant Officer G’haleb Sliman Alnasasra, 35, a tracker in the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade, from Rahat.
According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, some 1,600 deaths have been reported as a result of IDF actions since the end of the ceasefire, including 43 people reported killed on Friday, according to Reuters.
The ministry claims over 50,000 Gazans have been killed in the war, though its tolls cannot be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel estimated in January that it had killed some 20,000 combatants in Gaza.
Talks for a new ceasefire have reportedly been deadlocked over Israel’s demand that Hamas free 11 living hostages in exchange for an extended ceasefire, while Hamas has offered to release five.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded statement that Israel would not end the war in Gaza until Hamas had been completely dismantled, dampening hopes for a ceasefire.
He accused the terror group of rejecting a proposal for the return of half of the remaining living hostages and many of the slain hostages it holds in Gaza, and said Israel could not agree to Hamas’s demands to end the war and withdraw militarily from Gaza.
“If we capitulate to the dictates of Hamas now, all the great achievements of the war, which we achieved with the merit of our soldiers and our fallen and our heroic injured, all these achievements will disappear,” Netanyahu said.
The Times of Israel Community.