Israeli air strikes early Tuesday killed 10 family members of Hamas’ Qatar-based chief Ismail Haniyeh, including his sister, Gaza’s civil defense agency said.
The Israeli military, which is on a campaign to destroy Hamas following the October 7 attack, told AFP it was “aware of these reports, but we cannot confirm them.”
Mahmoud Basal, civil defense spokesman for the Hamas-ruled area, said the attack targeted the home of the Haniyeh family in the al-Shati refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
“The attack resulted in the martyrdom of 10 people, including Zahra Haniyeh, the sister of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh,” Basel told AFP.
He said there could still be many bodies under the rubble, but “we don’t have the necessary equipment” to retrieve them.
Basal said civil defence forces transferred the bodies to Al-Ahli hospital in nearby Gaza city. He also said “several people” were injured in the attack.
Hamas, the Islamist militant group that rules Gaza, is considered a terrorist organisation by major Western allies, including Israel and the United States.
Hamas referred to the bombing of the Haniyeh family’s home in a statement, saying it was a massacre carried out by Israel in the Palestinian territory.
It said the alleged bombing showed that Israel was “deliberately disregarding all international laws, humanitarian norms and values by targeting innocent civilians and committing the most horrific genocide against them”.
Three of Haniyeh’s sons and four grandchildren were killed in an Israeli attack in central Gaza in April, with the army accusing them of “terrorist activities”.
At the time, Haniyeh said that about 60 members of his family had been killed since the war began on October 7.
The war began after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Since then, Israel’s air, land and sea campaign has killed at least 37,626 people in Gaza, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the regional health ministry.
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