The Israel Defense Forces said Monday it had expanded its ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza over the past day, as attacks across the Strip were said to kill some 27 Palestinians, including three near a US- and Israel-backed aid distribution site in Rafah.
“In the past day, troops expanded the ground maneuver, eliminated terrorists and destroyed many weapons depots and terror infrastructure sites, above and below ground,” the IDF said. The statement added that the air force hit dozens of targets, including cells of terror operatives, buildings used by terror groups, tunnels, weapons depots, and other infrastructure.
The announcement came after IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the army on Sunday to begin operating in new areas in Gaza. The military has said it seeks to seize 75% of the Strip in the renewed offensive launched last month.
Palestinian media reported overnight that Israeli ground forces were approaching southern Gaza’s Khan Younis. IDF troops were said to demolish the rear wall of the city’s European Hospital after advancing toward the hospital over the past day. The military, in response to a query by The Times of Israel, denied that troops were operating within the European Hospital compound.
A May 13 airstrike targeted a Hamas tunnel system that ran underneath the hospital, killing the terror group’s leader in Gaza, Muhammad Sinwar, and two other senior commanders in its military wing. The IDF confirmed Saturday that Sinwar was killed in the strike, which killed at least 28 people, according to Hamas’s civil defense agency. Hamas’s figures cannot be independently verified and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Sinwar had taken over from his slain brother Yahya, who masterminded the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, which killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw 251 taken hostage, sparking the war in Gaza. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar in October 2024.
Israel has accused Hamas of using Gaza’s civilians as human shields and of embedding itself in civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques. The IDF says it takes steps to mitigate civilian harm, including by use of evacuation warnings, precision munitions, aerial surveillance, and other intelligence.
On Monday afternoon, the military carried out a strike against what it said was a Hamas command center embedded within a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
The IDF said that the command center was being used by Hamas operatives to plan and carry out attacks against troops and Israeli civilians.
According to Palestinian media, at least four people were killed in the strike on the Al-Aishiya school.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported another person killed in an Israeli drone strike in Khan Younis, and five others killed in a fighter jet strike on a family home in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, in the Strip’s north.
The Hamas civil defense agency said an Israeli strike on a family home in the northern town of Jabalia killed 14 people, including six children and three women. A spokesman for the agency said the strike hit a family home and there were “more than 20 missing individuals still under the rubble.”
The IDF confirmed to the Times of Israel that it had carried out strikes in Jabalia, but declined to provide further details on the targets.
The military had last week instructed the entire Jabalia area, as well as other towns in the Strip’s north and several Gaza City neighborhoods, to evacuate westward.
Another strike early Monday hit a mosque in Deir al-Balah. The military told The Times of Israel that it had targeted terror infrastructure in the area, and that it had warned civilians to evacuate the site ahead of the airstrikes.
Hamas’s media office said IDF gunfire early Monday killed three people and wounded 35 near an aid distribution site operated by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which Washington and Jerusalem have promoted as a way to circumvent Hamas in the distribution of aid.
The tolls could not immediately be verified. GHF said the distribution went on without incident, with “21 truckloads of food… totaling 18,720 boxes” handed out during the site’s opening hours, from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m.
The IDF said it was aware of the reports of casualties and was investigating the incident. According to the military, troops had opened fire on Palestinian “suspects who approached forces” overnight, around a kilometer (0.6 miles) away from the distribution site, hours before it was set to open to hand out food to Gazans.
The GHF has warned Palestinians in its announcements that the aid sites open no earlier than 5 a.m., and that approaching the area beforehand could be dangerous due to Israeli military activity.
The IDF said it was letting GHF operate “independently to distribute aid to Gaza residents and prevent it from reaching the Hamas terror organization.” The military also accused Hamas of doing “everything it can to prevent the success” of the new aid distribution system, which commenced operations last week.
“Hamas is a brutal terror organization that starves the population and puts it in danger to preserve its rule in the Gaza Strip,” the army said.
GHF has accused Hamas of fabricating previous accounts of chaos and gunfire around distribution sites, which are located in Israeli military zones.
“Despite several inaccurate and, in some cases, blatantly false news reports, there have been no injuries nor fatalities during the first full week of GHF operations,” the agency said Monday morning.
Over the past week, the agency said, it has distributed 5.8 million meals at three distribution sites in southern and central Gaza. But GHF’s classification of meals is based on boxes of dry food products that still require cooking equipment or community kitchens, which are very limited throughout the Strip after nearly 20 months of devastating conflict.
The IDF has acknowledged firing warning shots on previous occasions outside the distribution centers, including on Sunday, when troops fired at Palestinians about a kilometer away from an aid site, hours before it was set to open.
The early Sunday gunfire killed 31 people, according to Hamas health authorities and eyewitnesses, though GHF denied the reports and released some 15 minutes of footage that purported to show the distribution had proceeded without incident. The military said troops “did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres called Monday for an independent investigation into the reported killings.
“I am appalled by the reports of Palestinians killed and injured while seeking aid in Gaza yesterday. It is unacceptable that Palestinians are risking their lives for food,” Guterres said in a statement, without assigning blame for the deaths.
“I call for an immediate and independent investigation into these events and for perpetrators to be held accountable.”
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders said it had treated people who were “shot from all sides” by Israeli forces at the GHF site Sunday. The NGO, known by its French name MSF, blamed the GHF system.
“Patients told MSF they were shot from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and Israeli soldiers on the ground,” MSF said in a statement.
MSF emergency coordinator Claire Manera in the statement called the GHF’s system of aid delivery “dehumanizing, dangerous and severely ineffective.”
“It has resulted in deaths and injuries of civilians that could have been prevented,” said Manera. “Humanitarian aid must be provided only by humanitarian organizations who have the competence and determination to do it safely and effectively.”
MSF communications officer Nour Alsaqa reported hospital corridors filled with patients, mostly men, with “visible gunshot wounds in their limbs.”
MSF quoted one injured man, Mansour Sami Abdi, as describing people fighting over just five pallets of aid.
“They told us to take food — then they fired from every direction,” he said, according to MSF. “This isn’t aid. It’s a lie.”