Israel has blown up what it says was a “subterranean terror city” underneath a central Gaza City square that was used to plot the Oct 7 massacre.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it discovered “terrorist infrastructure” underneath Palestine Square, with lengthy tunnels connecting hiding places and offices belonging to Hamas’s senior military and political leaders.
Aerial footage released by the IDF showed a series of explosions in the city centre destroying the underground infrastructure.
Israel reported earlier this week that it had secured control of what it called Hamas’s “elite quarter” in Gaza City from which Hamas leaders operated.
The complex has been described as a “centre of power for Hamas’s military and political wing”.
Some 600 Hamas terrorists were killed in the operation in the Rimal neighbourhood, the IDF claimed.
“Palestine Square was a centre of Hamas’s military rule and is surrounded by buildings that served as command-and-control centres, terror tunnel shafts and strategic buildings belonging to the organisation,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that Hamas’s infrastructure was embedded in a busy neighbourhood full of shops, residential buildings and a school for deaf children.
The network was actively used by Hamas leaders Yahya SinwarMohammed Deif and others, including to direct the Oct 7 attack, the IDF claimed.
Despite a reported failure to reach a new agreement with Hamas on a hostage releaseIsrael is believed to be pursuing fresh efforts to rescue some of the 129 Israelis held captive in Gaza.
Israel is still reluctant to offer the lasting truce that Hamas is seeking but is willing to offer to cease fire for two weeks, not one week as previously suggested, according to public broadcaster Kan.
A frontier Israeli kibbutz said on Friday that a 73-year-old Israeli-US resident thought to have been kidnapped by Hamas from the kibbutz was actually killed on Oct 7 and his body was taken to Gaza, where it remains.
Gadi Haggai was presumed to have been kidnapped on the day Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel after he disappeared from the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where he lived with his wife, Judi.
Before the couple were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, Mrs Haggai managed to call a member of the kibbutz to say she had been shot in the arm and that her husband had been shot in the head. There have been no other signs from them since.
The new information sheds light on just how little is known about the fate of some of those who went missing on the morning of Oct 7.
Earlier this week, NBC reported that 26-year-old Noa Argamani was abducted by a civilian mob, not by Hamas as previously thought.
In a sign of a shift in public opinion, Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, called on Friday for a permanent ceasefire, arguing that his country’s international partners would soon force it to stop the war anyway but it might be too late to save the hostages.
“It’s decision time,” Mr Olmert wrote in an editorial for the Haaretz newspaper.
“The state of Israel now faces the choice between a ceasefire as part of a deal that may bring home the hostages in the hope that most of them are alive, and a ceasefire with no deal, no hostages, no apparent achievement, with a total loss of the remnants of international public support for the state of Israel’s right to exist without terror threats from murder organisations.”
Israel was expanding its ground operation in Gaza on Friday as the military told residents of Gaza’s central Bureij town to evacuate south, with the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman publishing a map of the zones that need to be evacuated, the Times of Israel reported.
Despite Israel’s declaration of safe areas for residents, aid agencies have said nowhere in the strip is safe.
Israeli air strike
In the northern town of Jabaliya, at least 16 people from the extended family of Gaza’s health minister were killed in an Israeli air strike on their home on Friday morning, according to the Palestinian Shehab news agency.
Munir Al Bursh, who has been offering daily updates on casualties of the war in Gaza, was critically injured in the attack on his sister’s house.
In southern Gaza, three people, including two children, were reported killed in what appears to be a targeted Israeli drone strike on a civilian car in Rafah, according to Yussuf Al Hams, director of a local hospital.
Al Jazeera on Friday morning carried images of crowds surrounding the destroyed vehicle that sat on a largely intact street. The target of the strike was not immediately reported.
On Israel’s northern border, a 17-hour break in cross-border fire with Hezbollah ended on Friday morning with a sustained salvo of rockets from southern Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed terrorist group is operating.
Later on Friday, the IDF said that it scrambled a fighter jet to shoot down a drone launched from Lebanon and heading to Israeli air space.
Authorities in Lebanon, who are believed to have little or no control over Hezbollah activities, have urged Israel to commit to a UN resolution dating back to the 2006 Lebanon war that should have prevented the fighting.
“We are totally ready to commit to their implementation, on condition the Israeli side does the same, and withdraws, according to the international laws and resolutions, from occupied territory,” Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, said in a statement.