The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet announced on Sunday that Ramzi Ramadan Abd Ali Salah, the commander of Hamas’s naval force in northern Gaza, was killed in an airstrike last Monday in Gaza City.
The military confirmed that he was the target of a strike in an internet cafe, which Hamas-linked authorities said killed 24 people, including women and children.
Several other terrorists were killed in the operation, the military said.
Salah, identified by the IDF as a key figure in Hamas’s maritime capabilities, had been actively planning attacks against Israeli forces operating in the Strip, the military said. He was targeted inside a building in Gaza City, where he was meeting with other operatives.
The strike, carried out by an Israeli Air Force jet, was guided by intelligence from the Navy, the Military Intelligence Directorate, and the Shin Bet.
Among the other Hamas members killed were Hisham Ayman Atiya Mansour, deputy head of a Hamas mortar unit, and Nassim Muhammad Suleiman Abu Sabha, a member of Hamas’s mortar unit, according to the joint statement.
The IDF said several measures were taken to minimize civilian harm, including the use of precision munitions, aerial surveillance, and intelligence assessments.
On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 33 Palestinians across Gaza, hospital officials said.
Twenty people were killed and 25 wounded when Israeli strikes hit two houses in Gaza City, according to Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa Hospital that serves the area.
In southern Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed by strikes in Mawasi, an area on Gaza’s Mediterranean where many displaced people live in tents, officials at Nasser Hospital in nearby Khan Younis told The Associated Press. Five of the dead belonged to the same family, according to the hospital.
The figures offered by hospital officials did not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
The military had no immediate comment on the individual strikes, but said it had struck 130 terror targets across the Gaza Strip in the previous 24 hours.
The IDF said the strikes targeted Hamas command and control structures, storage facilities, weapons, and launchers, and killed a number of terror operatives in northern Gaza.
Also on Sunday, the IDF provided further details on the incident in which Sgt. Asaf Zamir, 19, from Dimona, was killed on Friday in combat in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza.
According to the military, Zamir was killed during operational activity conducted by the 53rd Armored Corps Battalion of the 188th Brigade. During the incident, four other soldiers were wounded — two severely and two moderately.
Among the injured was the company commander, who sustained wounds while attempting to rescue the forces under fire.
Shortly after the attack, the Israeli Air Force struck and eliminated part of the cell responsible for the assault.
Israeli forces have operated inside the Gaza strip for over 20 months, since the Hamas-led terror onslaught on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 441.
During this time, more than 57,000 people have been killed in the Strip, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
The Hamas-provided death toll cannot be independently verified and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught that sparked the war.