JERUSALEM: Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Thursday announced the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who Israel has accused of masterminding the group's attack on October 7 last year.
"The mass murderer Yahya Sinwar, responsible for the massacre and atrocities of October 7th, was eliminated today by IDF (Israeli military) soldiers," Katz said in a statement sent to media.
Earlier, the Israeli military said Thursday it was looking into whether Sinwar was killed in a military operation in Gaza, while an Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians killed at least 28 people, including five children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
The military said in a statement that three militants were killed during operations in Gaza, without specifying where or elaborating further. It said the identities of the three were so far not confirmed, but it was “checking the possibility” that one of the three was Sinwar.
Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its brutal war on Gaza. Throughout the war, Sinwar has been in hiding.
For years Hamas' top figure in Hamas, Sinwar was chosen as its top leader following the assassination of Ismael Haniyeh in July in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran. Israel has also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas' military wing Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.
The report came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the Abu Hussein school was hit Thursday.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of Gaza Health Ministry’s local emergency unit, confirmed the toll from the strike and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military claimed it targeted a command center run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza.
In a separate development, a building in central Beirut that houses offices of the Al Jazeera news network and the Norwegian Embassy was evacuated after a warning.
Mazen Ibrahim, Al Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief, said the building’s administration received three calls telling everyone to leave the building, which he said also houses the embassies of Norway and Azerbaijan, as well as dozens of offices. He said it was unclear who called in the warning.
Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ragnhild Simenstad said the building was evacuated after a “bomb threat,” without elaborating.
Israel has ordered the evacuation of several buildings, as well as entire cities, towns and villages, as it strikes what it says are targets linked to the Hezbollah militant group.
There have also been several instances of evacuation warning calls and text messages that turned out to be bogus, which Lebanese security agencies say they are investigating.
Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed over 42,000 Palestinians, including more than 17000 children and 11500 women.
Northern Gaza was the first target of Israel’s ground invasion nearly a year ago and has suffered the heaviest destruction of the war, with entire neighborhoods in Gaza City and other towns reduced to rubble. Most of the population fled after Israel issued evacuation orders in the opening days of the war, but about 400,000 are believed to have remained despite the harsh conditions.
Earlier this month, Israel once again ordered the full-scale evacuation of the north, and allowed no food aid to enter the area for around two weeks. That led many Palestinians to fear that it had adopted a surrender-or-starve strategy suggested by former Israeli generals.
Israel allowed two shipments of aid to enter the north earlier this week after the United States warned it might reduce its military aid if its ally did not do more to address the humanitarian crisis.
Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have launched repeated operations into Jabaliya, a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians surrounding Israel’s creation. The Israeli military has been claiming that Hamas has repeatedly regrouped there after major operations.
(With inputs from AFP,AP)
