Dozens killed in Israeli operation targeting two Hamas officials

Palestinian health officials said Israeli airstrikes killed at least 90 people and wounded hundreds more in the Mawasi area west of Khan Younis on Saturday, in an operation the Israel Defense Forces said targeted two senior Hamas officials, including Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

Palestinian health officials described the attack as a “massacre.” In an interview with ReutersHamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri Hamas has dismissed reports that the strike targeted al-Daif as “nonsense,” even as the scale of the attack threatened to further derail progress in already tense ceasefire talks currently underway in Cairo and Doha.

Reuters footage showed hundreds of men, women and children running away from a huge column of smoke on the horizon, many carrying their bloodied and unconscious wounded in their arms or on makeshift stretchers.

In a press conference on Saturday, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said the attack was a targeted strike on a Hamas compound surrounded by trees, buildings and hangars, not a tent complex. He added that senior military commanders Deif and Rafi Salameh, as well as other Hamas operatives, were in the area, but he did not share details of the intelligence and said the IDF was still checking the outcome of the strike.

Abu Zuhri said Reuters “All” of the dead were civilians. NBC News could not independently verify the IDF or Hamas statements.

A Reuters video showed destruction and debris as people searched through the rubble among the white tents used by displaced Palestinians. In another video, Posted on Instagram Video footage verified and located by NBC News showed dozens of people digging with shovels and their bare hands into a vast crater caused by the explosion.

The IDF declared Al-Mawasi a safe humanitarian zone in December, although the area has come under repeated attack since then. Hagari said during the press conference that the IDF called on civilians to move to the area, but senior Hamas leaders infiltrated the population, prompting the raid.

Nearby hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. Mohamed Sakr, a spokesman for Nasser Hospital, told NBC News that the hospital did not have the capacity or medical supplies to deal with the wounded and injured, and that he expected “a number of the wounded to die due to lack of treatment.”

Within a few hours, Dr. Mohamed Saqr, Director of the Nursing Department at Nasser Hospital, passed away. He told Quds News Network: The hospital is “unable to continue providing its medical and nursing services due to the high number of deaths, injuries and amputees.”

Palestine Red Crescent Society Posted on X Medical sources reported that Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis received dozens of patients following the bombing, including some displaced people and residents of the organization’s shelter camp inside the affected area.

It was not immediately clear how the strike would affect the ceasefire talks, as the attack came just a day after US President Joe Biden issued a statement saying Israel and Hamas had agreed to a framework.

“Six weeks ago, I laid out a comprehensive framework for how to achieve a ceasefire and return the hostages home,” he wrote on X. “There is still work to be done and these are complex issues, but this framework is now agreed upon by Israel and Hamas.”

“My team is making progress and I am determined to get this done,” Biden added.

But the ongoing attacks on Gaza have repeatedly complicated already difficult negotiations. Abu Zuhri told Reuters that Saturday’s attack showed that Israel was not interested in reaching a ceasefire agreement. Hamas has previously criticized Israel for delaying a deal, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will not agree to any agreement that would prevent it from resuming its military campaign until Hamas is eliminated. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in May that Israel would not be able to completely eliminate Hamas’s presence in Gaza.

Netanyahu accused Hamas of making demands that conflict with the agreement brokered by Biden, although he did not specify what those demands were.

Hamas has dropped its demand that Israel commit in advance to a permanent cease-fire, but The Associated Press Reported The group says it still wants written guarantees that negotiations will continue until a permanent ceasefire is reached.

Nine months after Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinians are still suffering from a cycle of airstrikes, charred bodies pulled from the rubble, hospitals overflowing with the dead and wounded, and new rounds of destruction.

More than 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, many of them repeatedly as the Israeli military pushes back into parts of the enclave it had previously cleared.

At a donor conference, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday that Palestinians were being forced to “move like human pinballs through a landscape of destruction and death.” He added: “The extreme level of fighting and destruction is incomprehensible and inexcusable – and the level of chaos affects every Palestinian in Gaza and all those desperately trying to get aid to them.”

“Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse in Gaza, civilians are somehow pushed deeper into the circles of hell,” the Secretary-General added.

On Friday, an NBC News crew on the ground captured the aftermath of Israeli forces withdrawing from Tel al-Hawa, an industrial neighborhood in western Gaza City. The area’s famed high-rise buildings were reduced to rubble, while homes were charred, burned and demolished. Emergency workers say they found 20 bodies as they searched through the rubble, burned inside their homes.

“We were displaced first to Shujaiya, Sa’a and Tuffah, then we reached the industrial area,” Musa Attiya al-Dahdouh, who spent 20 days in Tal al-Hawa before the attack, told NBC News.

“They attacked us, and suddenly at two in the morning, everyone was running away. They saw the tanks, they saw the planes, so they all ran away. The planes started hitting; what could we do? Either live or die.”