The military on Monday said it targeted a Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative in an airstrike the day before in the central Gaza Strip, in which a Palestinian woman and her six children — including young quintuplets — were reportedly killed.
The strike early Sunday hit a home Deir el-Balah, killing Hala Khattab and her six children, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. An Associated Press reporter there counted the bodies.
Mohammed Awad Khattab, the children’s grandfather, said his daughter was a teacher, and the youngest child was 18 months. The others were 10-year-old quintuplets, the hospital said, while the New York times reported the eldest child was 15.
The newspaper said the children’s father Ashraf Attar “narrowly escaped with his life” and that the strike destroyed the family’s second-floor apartment. Hala Khattab’s brother Ahmad said Attar, a nurse, is not a terror operative and that “there is absolutely no explanation” for the strike, which broke on his brother-in-law’s arms and caused burns to his legs.
“The six children have become body parts. They were placed in a single bag,” Mohammed Awad Khattab told reporters. “What did they do? Did they kill any of the Jews? … Will this provide security to Israel?”
In response to a query on the strike, the IDF said that using “precise intelligence,” it targeted “a significant Islamic Jihad terrorist in the area of Deir al Balah.”
“The terrorist directed attacks on IDF troops throughout the war,” an IDF statement said, without naming the operative.
“The strike was conducted using a precise munition, following aerial surveillance and the calls made on Friday the civilian population to temporarily evacuate from the area in order to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians,” it added, after Ahmed Khattab told the Times that the family had not receive any sort of evacuation order or warning prior to the attack.
Also Monday, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza and a Palestinian news site said a journalist was killed by Israeli fire the previous day in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
“Ibrahim Muharab’s body was taken to Nasser Hospital” in Khan Younis, the ministry said.
Palestinian Daily News, a website for which Muharab worked, announced his death “following shelling from the Israeli occupation on him and a group of journalists.”
It added that Muharab’s body was found on Monday morning in Hamad City, a large apartment complex built by Qatar and now in ruins.
Two other journalists who were with Muharab at the time were wounded and sent to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, an AFP journalist on the ground reported.
Online videos that AFP could not separately authenticate show an Israeli armored vehicle advancing toward the Hamad neighborhood while bullets are being fired.
At least one man wearing a “Press” jacket can be seen running away from the shots before a voice can be heard saying “Ibrahim is wounded, where is he?”
About 30 people gathered on Monday at the hospital to stand around Muharab’s body, which was laid on the ground under a white plastic tarpaulin on which a bulletproof jacket marked “Press” was laid like a wreath, AFPTV footage showed.
Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army declined to comment on this specific case without receiving the geographic coordinates for the location of Muharab’s death and his identification card.
“The (Israeli army) has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists,” a spokesperson for the army told AFP.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned Muharab’s “assassination” and accused the Israeli army of leading an “organized campaign… to kill journalists” in Gaza.
Gaza journalist Ibrahim Qanan, who was at the hospital, accused Israel of “killing the truth by trying to wipe out all traces of transmission towards the outside world of what is happening in the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli army has killed several journalists in Gaza it has accused of belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad’s military branches.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported Monday that “at least 113 journalists and media workers” have been killed since the Hamas-led October 7 terror onslaught that started the war in Gaza, the “deadliest period for journalists since the CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”