IDF names three Hamas operatives killed in Saturday's Gaza strikes

Israel’s military said on Monday that strikes it carried out in the Gaza Strip over the weekend killed three Hamas operatives, whom it accused of planning attacks and rebuilding the group’s military capabilities.

The IDF said a strike in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood on Saturday killed Abdullah Mohammed Khamis Jaber, whom it called a Hamas weapons manufacturer and a key member of the group’s arms-production division, The Times of Israel reported from military correspondent Emanuel Fabian’s liveblog entry.

A separate strike in Tuffah killed Majed Ahmed Mustafa Sabbag, a Hamas cell commander, and a third strike in northern Gaza’s Jabalia killed Amer Bashir Mohammed Khourani, a member of a Hamas engineering battalion, the military said.

All three had recently worked to coordinate attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians and to restore Hamas’s military capabilities, “in systematic violation of the ceasefire,” the Jerusalem Post reported.

i24NEWS reported that the IDF said it used precision weapons and aerial monitoring to reduce the risk to civilians, and that it gave no information about civilian casualties.

The announcement comes amid conflicting accounts of the weekend toll. Haaretz reported on Sunday that medics and local reports said Israeli fire had killed at least eight people in Gaza since Saturday, including two children; Gaza’s Health Ministry said six were killed and 25 wounded over the previous 24 hours. UNICEF has said more than 340 children have been killed since the ceasefire took effect about a year ago, Arab News reported.

Illustration. Sources: Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, i24NEWS, Haaretz, Arab News/UNICEF.