Israel did not list Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as among the Hamas military leadership who had been eliminated.
Israeli forces have said that Deif, one of the organization’s top leaders, was an intended target of a strike on Khan Younis on Saturday that local authorities said killed 90 people. Hamas has repeatedly denied that Deif was killed in the strike. The group has accused Israel of using strikes to derail the latest cease-fire talks backed by the Biden administration, even as ground forces in Gaza are scaled back.
While Gaza has been the subject of nearly continuous fighting since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which were led by Hamas, Israel has only offered sporadic updates on how many of the militant group’s leadership and fighters have been killed in its response.
Speaking on a podcast in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that around 30,000 people had died in Gaza and that Hamas fighters accounted for “nearly half” of that toll, describing the ratio of civilians killed to combatants as “about one to one.”
The Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children, says that at least 38,713 people have been killed since Oct. 7, while 89,166 have been injured.
Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, with more than 320 killed since military operations began in Gaza.
In its announcement Tuesday, Israel’s military said that it was focusing its efforts on “locating terrorists who embed themselves and establish bases in sensitive sites across the Gaza Strip, including in hospitals, schools, and humanitarian shelters.”
“These areas are cynically exploited by terrorists who attempt to use them as hiding places and bases for terrorism,” the statement said, adding that the strikes against the infrastructure were in “accordance with international law.”
