Dozens of Palestinians were reported killed as the Israeli military said it struck prominent Hamas operatives at a command room embedded within an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in the southern Gaza Strip early Tuesday morning.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said fighter jets struck “significant Hamas terrorists” who were based in the command center in Khan Younis. Palestinian media reported that the strikes took place in the al-Mawasi region on the Strip’s southern coast, west of Khan Younis.
The prominent Hamas operatives had “advanced and deployed terror plots against IDF troops and Israeli civilians,” the military said.
The IDF said it took “many steps” to mitigate harm to civilians in the strike, including using precision munitions, aerial surveillance, and other intelligence.
Israeli officials did not immediately name the targets of the strike.
Authorities in the Hamas-run Strip claimed 40 people were killed and 60 were injured in the attack. The toll could not be immediately verified.
Hamas officials said rescue teams were hampered by large craters blasted into the ground where tents sheltering displaced Gazans previously stood.
A spokesperson for Hamas’s civil defense unit quoted by the Hamas-linked Shehab news agency claimed entire families were swallowed under mountains of sand in the strike, which left massive holes in the ground, and rescuers lack the equipment to dig them out.
Residents and medics said the humanitarian zone was struck by at least four missiles, leaving craters as deep as nine meters (30 feet).
Gaza’s Hamas-run civil emergency service said at least 20 tents caught on fire.
“Our teams are still moving out martyrs and wounded from the targeted area. It looks like a new Israeli massacre,” a Gaza civil emergency official said.
Videos showed Gazans desperately clawing at mounds of sand in the darkness as they tried to reach the dead and injured.
Hamas, meanwhile, claimed in a statement that its operatives were not in the area when it was hit by Israeli fighter jets.
“The occupation’s allegations of the presence of resistance fighters are a blatant lie,” Hamas said in a statement on Telegram.
The group has repeatedly denied embedding within civilian populations, despite evidence to the contrary.
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.
On Monday, following rocket fire from the northern Gaza Strip at the southern coastal city of Ashkelon a night earlier, the military called on Palestinians in the Atatra area to evacuate.
Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, published a map of the zones that need to be evacuated.
He said that “the specified area has been warned many times in the past” and it is “considered a dangerous combat zone,” following repeated rocket attacks on Israel.
Two rockets were launched at Ashkelon in the attack on Sunday night, one of which was intercepted while the other landed in the sea.
The IDF in recent months has repeatedly issued evacuation orders for areas from which terrorists launch rockets at Israel.
The war erupted when Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through southern communities on October 7, killing 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.