Senior Islamic Jihad leader ‘killed in Israel airstrike’
A senior leader of Islamic Jihad was killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to an official from the militant group.
The official identified the leader as Eyad Al-Hasani, a member of the Islamic Jihad’s top military council.
He was the sixth council member to be killed by Israel this week. Hasani’s aide was also killed in the strike.
Medical officials had said that two Palestinians were killed and several others were wounded in the strike on an apartment in the Gaza Strip on Friday.
The deadly confrontation between Israel and Palestinian militants continued for a third day as foreign mediators pushed ahead with efforts to broker a ceasefire.
As airstrikes were launched by Israel against targets in the Gaza Strip, the Islamic Jihad fired more rockets at Israel.
Recent fighting has killed 31 Palestinians in Gaza and a 70-year-old man in Israel.
The Israeli military said its war planes struck militant rocket launchers.
Gaza residents reported explosions in farms near the southern city of Rafah.
Meanwhile, a volley of rockets from Gaza triggered air raid sirens near Israel’s southern border, breaking a 12-hour lull that had raised hopes Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations would be able to secure a truce.
The cross-border exchanges this week have been between Israel and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza after the territory’s Hamas rulers.
On Tuesday, Israel launched simultaneous airstrikes that killed three Islamic Jihad commanders along with some of their wives and children as they slept in their homes.
Hundreds of homes have also been badly damaged leaving 165 Palestinians homeless, Gaza’s housing ministry reported.
Belal Bashir, a Palestinian living in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, whose family home was reduced to a heap of rubble in an airstrike, said: “The dream that we built for our children, for our sons, has ended.
“We were shocked that our house was targeted.”
Islamic Jihad has retaliated with more than 800 rockets fired toward densely populated parts of Israel.
Among the Palestinians killed in the fighting, were seven children and four women, according to the UN humanitarian office.
At least three of the children were killed by Palestinian rockets, according to the Israeli military and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
More than 90 Palestinians have been wounded, the health ministry reported.
The civilians deaths have drawn condemnation from the Arab world and concern from the United States and Europe.
In previous conflicts with Hamas, Israel has faced accusations of war crimes due to the high number of civilian casualties and its use of heavy weapons against the crowded enclave.
However, Israel argues Palestinian militant groups use civilians as human shields by launching attacks from populated areas.
Hamas, the de facto civilian government in Gaza, has sought to maintain its truce with Israel since a devastating 11-day war in 2021 that killed more than 260 Palestinians.
The group, which seized control of Gaza in 2007, has kept out of the current round of fighting, as it did during violence last summer.
