Israel’s military claimed to have killed a longtime Hamas spokesperson in an airstrike in Gaza City as Benjamin Netanyahu’s forces met to discuss the expanding offensive in some of the Strip’s most populated areas.
Hudayfa Samir Abdallah al-Kahlout, alias Abu Obeida, who represented Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, was killed over the weekend, Israeli defence minister Israel Katz announced.
Abu Obeida’s last statement was issued on Friday as Israel began the initial stages of the new offensive and declared Gaza City a combat zone. His statement said the militants would do their best to protect living hostages but warned that they would be in areas of fighting. He said the remains of dead hostages would “disappear forever”.
Israel’s military said the spokesperson had been behind the release of videos showing hostages as well as footage of the Hamas-led attack that sparked the war. The military also reiterated a threat against remaining Hamas leaders abroad.
Abu Obeida “was sent to meet all the eliminated members of the axis of evil from Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen at the bottom of hell”, wrote Mr Katz on X. He warned that with the “intensification of the campaign in Gaza, many more of his criminal partners – Hamas murderers and rapists – will join him there”.
Although Hamas has not confirmed his death, the Israeli military said Abu Obeida was killed in an operation “conducted jointly from the Shin Bet’s operations war room, in cooperation with the Southern Command, and was made possible thanks to prior intelligence gathered by the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence”.
The military said Abu Obeida “served as the public face of the Hamas terrorist organisation” and “disseminated Hamas’ propaganda”.
“In this role, he oversaw spokesperson operations across brigades and battalions, coordinated between political media elements and the military wing, and was the senior figure setting propaganda policy,” it added.
At least seven people were killed and 20 were injured in the strikes on the densely populated al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to reports. About five missiles struck the second and third floors of a six-storey apartment in al-Rimal from two different angles, BBC News reported.
Israel has killed many of Hamas’s military and political leaders as it attempts to dismantle the group and prevent an attack like the one on 7 October 2023, when militants abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200, mostly civilians, in southern Israel. Fewer than 50 hostages remain in Gaza, and Israel believes about 20 are alive. Families protested outside the security cabinet meeting, angry that it was not discussing a ceasefire.
The military has urged the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City to flee south, but many say they are exhausted after repeated displacements or unconvinced that any safe place in Gaza remains.
More than 90 per cent of the over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced at least once during the war, many of them multiple times, according to the UN.
Israel has signalled that aid to Gaza City will be reduced, and it has announced new infrastructure projects in southern Gaza as seven more Palestinians died of malnutrition-related causes. That brought the adult death toll from malnutrition-related causes to 215 since June, when the health ministry in the Hamas-run Strip started to count them, it said, and 124 children have died of malnutrition-related causes since the war began.
Israel’s almost two-year-long offensive in Gaza has killed at least 63,371 Palestinians.
