Israel Targets Hamas's Al-Amoudi in Gaza Airstrike

Israel said on Saturday that a pre-dawn Gaza airstrike on a residential apartment in Gaza City was an attempt to kill one of the most senior Hamas figures left in the Strip. Local officials said five people were killed in the Gaza airstrike, four of them women, and the fate of the intended target is still unclear.

The Israeli military said it aimed to kill Ali al-Amoudi, described as the right-hand man of slain Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and accused of helping to plan the October 7, 2023 attack. Israel said it ordered the Gaza airstrike after learning he was inside an apartment building in the Rimal neighbourhood, and said it was reviewing whether the strike killed or injured him. The military argued the location showed that Hamas was using civilians as human shields.

Officials at Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital told AFP they received five bodies and a number of injured people at dawn following the Gaza airstrike, according to reporting by The Leaders Online. The dead included two women and their daughters, as well as a man. Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesman for the civil defence agency which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said two missiles hit the apartment directly, setting off a fire and damaging the building.

Who Israel said it was after

"Today, al-Amoudi is the most senior Hamas figure in the Gaza Strip and is directly involved in Hamas's terror activities and in rebuilding the organisation for war. The terrorist was struck in order to remove the threat," the Israeli military said in a statement, which also claimed that "steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians, including the use of precise munitions." The military added that it "regrets any harm caused to uninvolved individuals."

Israel killed Sinwar in Gaza in October 2024, and has described al-Amoudi as his successor as the movement's top figure inside the territory. The broader Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayaa, lives in Qatar and has been trying to position the movement diplomatically. He agreed in July to a US plan under which Hamas would give up its weapons, an agreement that President Donald Trump hailed as a breakthrough while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed it as insincere.

Christians among the dead

Two of the five people killed were Christians, the hospital director said. Medics and the church identified the two women as fifty-six-year-old Maysaa Abu Daoud and her thirty-six-year-old daughter Mary Al-Najjar, and mourners gathered later on Saturday at the small Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City for their funeral. Around one thousand Christians, most of them Orthodox, live in the Palestinian territory, with a larger community in the West Bank where emigration has increased since the war began.

Ihab Ayad, a relative of the women, said they had been "minding their own business" at home when the strike hit. "We didn't hurl stones or fire rockets," he said. "If any child among us carries a stone, they call him a terrorist, a murderer. But they possess the most powerful arsenal and destroy everything."

A ceasefire under strain

The Gaza airstrike came on the anniversary according to the Jewish calendar of the October 7 attack, which killed one thousand two hundred twenty-one people according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures. Israel's offensive in response has left much of Gaza in ruins and killed more than seventy-four thousand two hundred people, according to Gaza's health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. For wider context on the toll, GenZNewZ previously reported on the rising death count as the ceasefire stalled.

Israel has vowed to keep destroying Hamas even though a US-brokered ceasefire was declared a year ago, and it says the group has been rearming and launching attacks in violation of the truce. Hamas denies this and accuses Israel of undermining the peace deal. According to Gaza's health ministry, Israeli forces have killed more than one thousand four hundred forty people since the ceasefire was announced, while the Israeli military has identified five deaths in its ranks over the same period, along with the death of one civilian contractor. The back-and-forth over the truce has been a running story, including the diplomatic fallout covered here last month.

Last year's US-brokered ceasefire calls for eventual reconstruction of the territory, according to Reuters, but little progress has been made toward implementing the deal's remaining terms, including Hamas disarmament and an Israeli troop withdrawal. Saturday's Gaza airstrike shows how far the reality on the ground is from the truce on paper.