Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Wednesday that a second Israeli bombing raid in two days had killed and wounded “dozens” Wednesday at the territory’s biggest refugee camp, Jabaliya.
It said there were “dozens of martyrs and injured in a bombing by the occupation planes,” a day after Israel acknowledged the first strikes, saying they targeted a top Hamas commander.
Images obtained by French news agency Agence France-Presse showed major damage and rescuers said “whole families” were killed Wednesday, but casualty details could not be immediately confirmed.
Meanwhile, Hamas has claimed that seven hostages taken from its Oct. 7 attacks inside Israel, including three foreign passport holders, were killed in Israel’s first bombing of Gaza’s largest refugee camp on Tuesday.
Dozens of bodies were seen on Tuesday at the Jabalia camp where Israel said it killed a Hamas military commander in a strike on a tunnel complex.
“Seven detainees were killed in the Jabalia massacre yesterday, including three holders of foreign passports,” a Hamas military wing statement said on Wednesday, according to AFP.
No details were given and it was not possible to independently verify the claim. The military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, previously announced that “almost 50” hostages had been killed in earlier raids.
Israel says that 240 hostages were taken when Hamas fighters crossed the border to stage raids in which they killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
Israel’s raid on the Jabalia camp was one of thousands since the attacks, which the Hamas health ministry says have killed more than 8,500 people, two-thirds of them women and children.
The Israeli military said its fighter jets “assassinated Ibrahim Biari, commander of the Jabalia brigade of the Hamas terrorist organization, who was one of those who directed the murderous terrorist attack on October 7.”
“Hamas’s underground military infrastructure beneath these buildings collapsed” in the strike, it said, and “many Hamas terrorists” were killed.
Facing growing domestic pressure, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said freeing the hostages is a priority of the military campaign.
Questioned this week about the civilian toll in Gaza and the risk to hostages, Netanyahu said there had to be “a moral distinction between the deliberate murder of the innocent and the unintentional casualties that accompany every legitimate war, even the most just war.”