Two PIJ commanders killed in IDF strike in central Gaza, IDF and Shin Bet say
Thursday airstrike targeted command post embedded in humanitarian zone; military says it also struck two former schools housing Hamas command sites in Gaza City
Two Palestinian Islamic Jihad battalion commanders were killed in a recent Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, the IDF and Shin Bet announced Saturday.
Also on Saturday, the IDF said it had carried out airstrikes on command rooms operating from two former schools in Gaza City.
A Thursday strike on the battalion commanders targeted a command room embedded within the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, according to the military.
Several terror operatives were killed in the strike, including Abdullah Khattab, the commander of PIJ’s South Deir al-Balah Battalion, and Hatem Abu al-Jidyan, the commander of PIJ’s East Deir al-Balah Battalion, the IDF and Shin Bet said.
The IDF said Khattab had overseen his battalion during the October 7 onslaught and was involved in numerous attacks on Israel and troops, including rocket fire and anti-tank fire.
Abu al-Jidyan also advanced numerous attacks against troops amid the ongoing fighting.
To mitigate harm to civilians in the strike, the IDF said it carried out “many steps,” including using precision munitions, aerial surveillance, and other intelligence.
“This is another example of the systematic use by the terror organizations in the Gaza Strip of the population and civilian infrastructure, including the humanitarian zone, to carry out terror acts against the state and IDF troops,” the military added.
As for the Saturday strikes on the schools, according to the military, Hamas was using the Amr Ibn al-Aas School in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood to plan and carry out attacks against troops and Israel.
“Three martyrs and more than 20 wounded people were retrieved after an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at a prayer room and a classroom at the Amr Ibn al-Aas School, where refugees were sheltering in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in northern Gaza City,” Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defense agency, told AFP.
In the other strike, the military said Hamas was using the Halima al-Sadia School in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood to plan and carry out attacks against troops and Israel.
At least 8 Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA reported.
The IDF earlier said in a statement it had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control center… embedded inside a compound that previously served as the ‘Halima al-Sa’diyya’ School in the northern Gaza Strip.” It said Hamas “systematically violates international law, brutally exploiting civilian institutions and the population as a human shield for terror activity.”
Wafa said the dead were in refugee tents inside the former school.
The IDF also said it carried out “many steps” to mitigate casualties in those strikes.
In recent months, dozens of airstrikes have been carried out against Hamas sites embedded within schools and other sites used as shelters for civilians, according to the IDF.
In central Gaza’s urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of nine people killed in two separate air raids. One hit a residential building, killing four people and wounding at least 10, while five people were killed in a strike on a house in western Nuseirat.
Separately, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, central Gaza’s main hospital, said a woman and her two children were killed in a strike on a house in the nearby urban refugee camp of Bureij.
The military did not immediately comment on those incidents.
The IDF also released footage Saturday from a recent engagement with gunmen in the Tel Sultan neighborhood of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, when troops raided a building where a group of terror operatives were holed up. Amid the raid, the gunmen hurled a grenade at the troops, wounding at least one of the soldiers.
The IDF said the troops returned fire, killing the gunmen. On their bodies, the soldiers found weapons and documents, the military added.
In recent days, the IDF said troops have killed dozens of gunmen in Tel Sultan.
Meanwhile, the United Nations, in collaboration with local health authorities, has pursued a campaign to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza after its first polio case in around 25 years. Limited pauses in the fighting have allowed the campaign to proceed.
UN officials said they were making progress, having reached over half of the children needing the drops in the first two stages in the southern and central Gaza Strip.
On Sunday, the campaign will move to the northern Gaza Strip. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.
War erupted when Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through southern communities on October 7, murdering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages to Gaza, while committing brutal atrocities.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 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 17,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 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.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 342.
