Analysts say it is part of an Israeli strategy to ramp up pressure on Hamas in ongoing diplomatic negotiations aimed at securing a cease-fire and the release of the more than 100 hostages still held by the group. Dozens of captives are still alive, Israeli officials say, though no one knows exactly how many.
Israel’s military says it is targeting fighters and commanders embedded within the population; large-scale strikes Saturday were aimed at Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing. The attack, one of the war’s deadliest, killed the commander of Hamas forces in the southern city of Khan Younis, according to the IDF, which has said it is still assessing whether Deif was among the dead. Hamas claims he is still alive.
The blasts have taken a heavy toll on civilians — hitting densely populated schools and makeshift encampments, some in areas where Israel had told people they would be safe.
The United States supports Israeli strikes against militant targets, “but they need to be carried out in a way that … minimizes and prevents civilian harm,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said this week.
Gazan civilians, most displaced multiple times during the war, say there is no refuge from the violence.
“Every time [Israel] talks about a new phase, we think it will be calmer or closer to ending the war, but what is happening is exactly the opposite: the war is getting hotter and more difficult,” Mahmoud, 51, told The Washington Post.
He spoke by phone from Mawasi, in southern Gaza, which has been hit twice this week — including in the strikes on Deif — despite being designated by Israel as a humanitarian zone. Fearing reprisal, he spoke on the condition that only his first name be used.
“Anything could happen, and you could be killed,” said Mahmoud. “Why? Because you were in a place with a wanted person and didn’t know it.”
He was several hundred yards away from another strike on Tuesday, which he said came without warning. Seventeen people were killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The area is packed with tens of thousands of Palestinian families who heeded Israeli evacuation orders in May — fleeing Rafah, on the border with Egypt, to the once desolate stretch of coastline.
The Israel Defense Forces said the strike targeted a senior militant in Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally, and that it was “looking into reports stating that several civilians were injured.”
Mahmoud said he would stay in Mawasi for now, as there was no “truly safe” place to go.
The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 38,700 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including 503 people since Saturday. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says a majority of the dead are women and children.
The official death toll reached 30,000 in late February and has slowed significantly in the months since, but officials say they are no longer able to provide a comprehensive count because of the breakdown of Gaza’s health-care system and communication networks, as well as Israeli restrictions on movement. Medical staff and humanitarian workers say the ministry figure is an undercount, since it does not include thousands of bodies believed to be buried under rubble, or those not brought to hospitals.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel was “at a critical stage of the war” and was “drawing close to victory.”
Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas, which led a brutal assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 Israelis and taking about 250 hostages. But he is at odds with Israel’s top generals, who say Hamas cannot be eliminated.
Suggesting otherwise, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said last month, is “throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”
The IDF said this week it had killed or apprehended 14,000 militants, less than half of low-end estimates for Hamas’s prewar fighting force. The military did not provide evidence to support the figures.
Israel’s intensifying raids are intended to pressure Hamas to make concessions in cease-fire talks, which have picked up momentum over the last several weeks after months of stalemate, said Kobi Michael, a former government official and now a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The strikes are targeting higher-ranking Hamas figures who have only recently emerged from underground, according to Michael, which he said was a testament to Israel’s progress in destroying parts of Gaza’s vast tunnel network.
“There are many fewer places to hide,” he said.
Hamas officials have accused Israel of trying to derail diplomatic negotiations, though the group has not withdrawn from talks.
Wes Bryant, a retired senior targeting professional in the U.S. Air Force, said it appeared that multiple 2,000-pound bombs were used in Saturday’s attack targeting Deif in Mawasi, based on images of the aftermath. Ninety people were killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israeli strikes are “liquidating [Gazans] in their sleep,” said Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. humanitarian coordination office in Gaza. In Saturday’s strike, “we found 90 of them; the rest are evaporated,” he said.
“We are incredibly troubled by the ongoing deaths of Palestinians in Gaza,” Miller, the State Department spokesman, said Monday. “If it turns out to be true that Muhammed Deif was actually hiding among civilians … it just shows the very difficult challenge that this war poses.”
Petropoulos was at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday where civilians began arriving with horrific wounds. Suheal Khan, a surgeon from London volunteering for several weeks at Nasser, described the scene as “bedlam.”
People came in with “body pieces, limbs hanging off, some injuries I’ve never seen before in terms of clean-cut, sliced-through limbs” from flying fragments. He stepped over dead bodies, he said, to treat children on blood-covered floors. People with chest injuries “had little chance of surviving” as Gaza’s reserve of specialized doctors dwindles.
Within days, “many patients had maggots in their wounds,” Khan said, as staff lacked the medical equipment needed to properly treat open fractures and amputated limbs. He said doctors often have no reliable supply of water, IV fluids, gloves or gowns.
Later on Saturday, in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, strikes killed 22 people in a makeshift mosque, according to Mahmoud Basal, a civil defense spokesman.
The IDF said “approximately 20 Hamas terrorists from the Al-Shati battalion” were killed, including engineers, snipers and an operative who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.
Yasser Ghaly, 27, was in a house nearby. He fled to the area last month after Israel issued evacuation orders for his Gaza City neighborhood.
He ran to the scene, helping move the injured “until my clothes were stained with blood.” His 16-year-old neighbor had to have an arm removed.
“There may be some people from Hamas or from other organizations, but is it reasonable that people were bombed while they were praying in the mosque?” he said.
In May, the Biden administration stopped supplying Israel with 2,000-pound bombs — like the kind likely used in the Saturday strikes in Mawasi — citing their impact on heavily populated areas.
But the small precision munitions used in other recent strikes can also have catastrophic consequences, said Trevor Ball, a former explosive ordnance disposal technician for the U.S. Army.
“When they are used in areas where there are just tents or in streets … they have high likelihoods of generating more casualties because there’s nothing to protect any civilians nearby from the fragmentation of the blast wave,” he said.
Trevor said a U.S.-made small-diameter munition was likely used in a strike Sunday on the Abu Oraiban school in Nuseirat in central Gaza. At least 22 people were killed and 100 wounded, according to Basal.
Throughout the war, displaced Gazans have sought shelter in school buildings run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. “The scope and scale” of the recent attacks “have been extremely costly in lives and infrastructure,” UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara al-Rifai said Tuesday.
The school in Nuseirat was one of seven to be hit in the past 10 days, she said. The IDF said in a statement that it was targeting Hamas “terrorists” operating at the school.
Eyewitness Mohammad al-Tahrawi, 31, said one of the missiles hit near a room housing plainclothes civilian police, who were providing security.
“Schools now include security points,” he explained “after repeated incidents of attacks by thieves.”
The IDF says Gaza’s civil police officers are legitimate military targets. The campaign against them has fueled lawlessness across the Strip and made it virtually impossible for aid groups to safely deliver humanitarian assistance as starvation spreads.
Abdel Azim Abdel Hadi, 57, was staying in the school with his family, but he was in line for bread when the attack hit. He spent hours moving between hospitals trying to locate his wife and six children, he told The Post by phone.
Four-year-old Mahmoud had been burned beyond recognition, he said. His wife had surgery on a leg wound. Maysar, his 2-year-old daughter, was still clinging to life when he found her with her eyes burned shut.
She died soon after, he said.
Harb reported from London and Balousha from Cairo. Louisa Loveluck in London, Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv and Cate Brown in Washington contributed to this report.
