Israeli airstrike takes out Hamas chief hiding under refugee camp
The IDF says it struck a bunker beneath the Jabalia refugee camp where a senior Hamas commander who played a pivotal role in the October 7 attacks was concealed.
Israel said Tuesday it hit a Hamas command and tunnel network in northern Gaza causing widespread damage in a crowded Palestinian refugee camp.
Israel said it killed dozens of militants, including a commander who it said led the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Hamas said hundreds were dead or wounded but didn’t say how many were militants, while hospital officials in Gaza reported receiving scores of dead bodies.
Hundreds were killed and wounded, according to Hamas-run health authorities, and the Israeli strikes flattened entire apartment blocks, leaving deep craters. Video footage aired by Palestinian television networks and Al Jazeera showed hundreds of people digging through the rubble with their hands to extract bodies and survivors, many of them children.
IDF says ground forces took control of a Hamas "military stronghold" in western Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip today. During fighting in the compound, which is used by the Jabaliya Battalion, forces killed several terrorists and the Air Force struck sites and other operatives. Some… pic.twitter.com/pZ40DuvOHO
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) October 31, 2023
Israel’s military said the assault targeted “terrorists and terror infrastructure belonging to the Central Jabalia Battalion,” saying militants had taken control over civilian buildings in Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza City. It said the strike had killed large numbers of militants. Israeli ground troops, backed by tanks and jet fighters, are expanding their invasion against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the military had struck an underground bunker where a senior Hamas commander who played a pivotal role in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel was hiding. He said dozens of militants had been killed along with the commander. He also said the strike hit between buildings, but that the collapse of tunnels used by Hamas militants in the area led to significant structural damage.
“This was an important military strike to us,” Conricus said. The strikes highlighted the risks for Israel’s military of carrying out a ground invasion in a dense urban environment. For more than three weeks, Israel has been asking residents of northern Gaza to move to the southern end of the enclave, warning it intended to fight a destructive battle with Hamas in its northern stronghold. Many Gazans have been unable to flee due to ongoing Israeli airstrikes and some have decided to stay in their homes, fearful they won’t be able to return.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the military had made achievements in its invasion of Gaza, but that “in war there is also a price, and the price over the past day has been high.” Two Israeli soldiers were killed Tuesday, according to the military.
Israel is coming under increasing international pressure as casualties in Gaza mount, and Tuesday’s strike is likely to add to the challenges that the U.S. and other Western countries face in maintaining public support for the military operation.
The Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza say more than 8,520 people have been killed in the enclave since Israel began its bombing campaign, most of them women and children. It doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians.
Operational Update with an IDF Spokesperson, LTC Jonathan Conricus. https://t.co/qSjlRurj7b
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 31, 2023
In Washington, protesters interrupted Senate testimony Tuesday from Secretary of State Antony Blinken with chants of “Save the children of Gaza,” and “Cease-fire now!” Blinken will travel to Israel on Friday for meetings with members of the Israeli government, the State Department said on Tuesday.
U.S. officials have been pressing their Israeli counterparts to avoid civilian casualties, including asking what a senior defense official described as “tough questions” about potential Israeli strikes on population centers and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. On Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to Gallant and “stressed the imperative to protect innocent civilians,” the Pentagon said.
The Pentagon has emphasized, however, that it is advising and guiding Israeli forces, rather than issuing directives or putting restrictions on their use of U.S.-provided weapons, which includes artillery, ammunition, precision-guided munitions and air defense.
“We’ve made it both clear publicly and privately about our concern for the protection of innocent life and the respect for the law of war,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.
Ryder declined to comment on Tuesday’s airstrikes, but said Hamas had “willfully and deliberately integrated their operations, their command-and-control nodes, armories, rockets targeting Israel among the innocent Gazan population, thus, in effect employing them as human shields.”
The Israeli military said Tuesday’s strikes in Jabalia caused underground tunnels used by militants to collapse, and as a result adjacent buildings also collapsed.
The Israeli strikes killed the Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, as well as “a large number of terrorists who were with Biari,” the Israeli military said.
Biari was leading Hamas’s forces in northern Gaza, played a lead role in commanding Hamas’s forces that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and also planned a 2004 terrorist attack in which 13 Israelis were killed, the Israeli military said.
Miri Eisin, a former deputy head of the combat intelligence corps and assistant to the director of military intelligence, said the Israeli assault on Jabalia had tactical and symbolic significance.
“The significance lies not in the exposure of a battalion, of which there are many, but in attacking them in one of their strongholds,” she said. Jabalia is one of the main tunnel hot spots in Gaza, and a large portion of buildings serve as entry and exit points for Hamas’s extensive underground network, Eisin said.
In conjunction with the airstrikes in northern Gaza, the Israeli military said ground troops from the Givati Brigade took over a Hamas compound in western Jabalia, killing approximately 50 militants during the battle over the past 24 hours.
A Hamas official didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military said the area contained rocket-firing positions, tunnels by Hamas militants to reach the coast from which they have staged attacks against Israel, and a large cache of weapons. Israeli troops retained control of the compound after their assault, the Israeli military said.
The Israeli military has been conducting frequent airstrikes on Jabalia as its ground invasion to topple Hamas picks up speed.
The casualties from the Israeli strike were taken to Kamal Adwan Hospital and Indonesian Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Gaza. Before Tuesday’s attacks, the hospitals were already struggling to function, with a shortage of medicines and fuel, and a large number of injured patients.
Marwan Al-Qasem, a doctor at the Indonesian Hospital, said he had watched dozens of corpses and hundreds of injuries arrive since the blast, which happened around 3:30 p.m. local time. “We are still working on the injuries that are coming in every minute, still in
coming.” “We are running out of fuel and soon lifesaving procedures will stop,” he added.
Jabalia is the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps -- which over decades have become dense, permanent communities -- with around 116,000 registered Palestinians living there, according to the United Nations.
Zahra Abu Oun, a 52-year-old kindergarten director, was at a relative’s home in Jabalia when the blast hit the neighborhood. “It was like an earthquake,” she said. “I lost dozens of my neighbors, friends and their relatives.”
Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, on Tuesday continued its indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli communities and cities near Gaza and in central Israel. Since the war began, it has fired more than 8,500 rockets at Israeli population centers where millions live, according to Israeli officials. Rockets fired from Gaza have killed 13 people in Israel, according to Israeli paramedics.
About 200,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes near the border with Gaza as well as the border with Lebanon, where the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has also been firing rockets and antitank missiles into Israel.
Fatima AbdulKarim, Suha Maayeh, Menna Farouk, Daniel Nasaw and Stephen Kalin contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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