The Israeli army claimed on Monday to have killed Muhammad Salah, a senior official and weapons development expert of Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, while declaring that it was continuing its operations in Rafah.
In a statement, the army said its air force had “eliminated terrorist Muhammad Salah, who was responsible for projects and development within the Hamas weapons manufacturing headquarters.”
“Salah was part of a strategic weapons development project” for Hamas, in charge of a number of teams “working on weapons development,” the statement said.
However, these claims could not be independently verified.
Bombing raids targeted the Gaza Strip on Monday, after the Israeli Prime Minister announced that the “intense” phase of fighting was “about to end,” particularly at Rafah in the south of the Palestinian territory, but that the war against Hamas would continue.
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The Islamist movement responded on Monday that any agreement must “include a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal” of Israel from Gaza, conditions which Israel has always rejected.
‘Rampant’ Looting
The head of the United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees warned on Monday that a breakdown of civil order in Gaza had allowed widespread looting and smuggling and blocked aid delivery.
More than eight months of war have led to desperate humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip and repeated UN warnings of famine.
“Gaza has been decimated,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told the agency’s advisory body.
“We have witnessed unprecedented failures of humanity in a territory marked by decades of violence,” he said, according to a written version of his address to the event in Geneva, which took place behind closed doors.
“Palestinians and Israelis have experienced terrible losses and suffered immensely.”
Pointing to the dire humanitarian situation since the war erupted following Hamas fighters’ October 7 attack inside Israel, he warned that Gazans were in “a living hell, a nightmare from which they cannot wake”.
Desperation among Gaza’s 2.4 million population has increased as fighting rages, sparking warnings from agencies that they are unable to deliver aid.
Vital supplies of food have piled up undistributed on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing, a key conduit for aid to enter Gaza.
Israel, which has relentlessly attacked the besieged Palestinian territory since October, claims it has let supplies in.
UN agencies and aid groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm about severe shortages of food and other essentials in the Gaza Strip, exacerbated by overland access restrictions and the closure of the key Rafah crossing with Egypt since Israeli forces seized the Palestinian side in early May.
Lazzarini insisted on Monday that the “catastrophic levels of hunger across the Gaza Strip are the result of human action”.
“The breakdown of civil order has resulted in rampant looting and smuggling that impede the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid,” he said.
“Children are dying of malnutrition and dehydration, while food and clean water wait in trucks,” he lamented.
‘National Failure’
An Israeli campaign group led by relatives of hostages held in Gaza said Monday an end to the Israel-Hamas war without bringing the captives home would be a “national failure”.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum responded to remarks by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a TV interview on Sunday, in which he said the “intense phase” of the fighting in the Gaza Strip was winding down, though the war as such was not nearing its end.
“Ending the fighting in Gaza without freeing the hostages would be an unprecedented national failure and a departure from the war’s objectives,” the families’ forum said in a statement.
“The responsibility and duty to return all hostages lies with the prime minister. There is no greater test than this.”
During Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that started the bloodiest ever Gaza war, militants abducted 251 hostages, of whom 116 still remain in the Palestinian territory including 41 the Israeli army says are dead.
Netanyahu, in his first Israeli media interview since the war began, told Channel 14 Sunday that the goal remains to “return the kidnapped and uproot the Hamas regime” in Gaza.
He also said that he was “willing to carry out a partial deal… that will bring back some of the people (hostages), and continue the war after a pause to achieve the goal of eliminating Hamas. That I’m not willing to let go of.”
With AFP
