An Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas commander who built the terror group’s paragliding unit used in the Oct. 7 attack, the IDF said.
Army officials confirmed this morning that Nasim Abu Ajina, the commander of the Beit Lahia Battalion of Hamas’s Northern Brigade, was killed in an airstrike in Gaza on Monday evening.
Footage shared by the IDF showed Israeli fighter jets hitting his home, with a series of large explosions visible.
Abu Ajina was responsible for the October 7 invasion, in which about 1,400 people were killed and 239 were taken hostage. Paragliders landed at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im at dawn, killing scores of revelers.
Festival-goers saw people falling around them as more than 250 people were killed in the surprise cross-border attack that sparked the worst in decades in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Army officials confirmed this morning that Nasim Abu Ajina, the commander of the Beit Lahia Battalion of Hamas’s Northern Brigade, was killed in an airstrike on Monday evening.
Footage shared by the IDF showed Israeli fighter jets hitting his home, with a series of large explosions visible.
According to YNet, Abu Ajina had previously led the terrorist group’s air units and contributed to the development of its UAVs and paragliders.
A statement from the IDF and Israel’s Shin Bet security service said Abu Ayina’s death was a serious blow to Hamas’s ability to disrupt IDF operations on the ground.
Israel said its forces attacked Hamas gunmen in the terrorist’s vast network of tunnels under the Palestinian enclave of Gaza last day.
The tunnels are a priority target for Israel as it expands its ground operations in the Gaza Strip to wipe out Hamas, which rules Gaza after its deadly surprise attack on southern Israel three weeks ago.
“In the last day, the combined IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) attacked about 300 targets, including anti-tank missile and rocket launching posts under shafts, as well as military sites in underground tunnels belonging to the terrorist organization Hamas,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The terrorists responded with anti-tank missiles and machine gun fire, it said.
“The soldiers killed terrorists and sent air forces to strike targets and terrorist infrastructure in real time,” the Israeli military said.
Israeli troops and Hamas militants fought fierce battles in Gaza today, where the terrible humanitarian crisis worsened and weeping Palestinian families combed the rubble in a desperate search for loved ones.
Israeli military footage showed tanks and armored bulldozers digging up bomb-scarred dirt roads and troops searching destroyed buildings for Hamas fighters and the 240 hostages still missing.
Israel struck 300 targets on the fourth night of its land operations in the northern Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials. The attack came after the bloodiest attack in its history, in which Hamas gunmen killed about 1,400 people in a brutal cross-border raid.
The army said its forces were “engaged in fierce fighting with Hamas deep in the Gaza Strip” and killed dozens of terrorists.
Warplanes carried out a relentless barrage of attacks on Gaza, where bombings have now killed 8,525 people, including many children, according to the latest count by the Hamas-run health ministry.
Panic gripped the crowd celebrating in the northwestern Negev desert, about 5 miles from the town of Ofakim.
Israeli festival-goers run for their lives across the desert after being warned of an impending rocket attack, just as Hamas invaded the country on Saturday
The ministry later said another 50 people had died in an Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected growing international calls for a ceasefire, saying it would be a “capitulation” to the Hamas group he had vowed to destroy.
Hamas also released footage of fighting inside the Gaza Strip, including what it said was a burning military vehicle.
None of the footage could be independently verified, but AFP images showed plumes of smoke rising over Gaza and Israeli helicopters firing rockets into the northern Gaza Strip.
The humanitarian damage has sparked a global backlash as aid agencies and the United Nations warning period expires for many of the territory’s 2.4 million people, who are denied access to food, water, fuel and medicine.
Palestinians search for victims at the site of Israeli attacks on houses in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023.
Palestinians search for victims at the site of Israeli attacks on houses in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023.
Palestinians search for victims at the site of Israeli attacks on houses in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023.
Relatives of Palestinians who lost their lives after Israeli attacks mourn as bodies are carried out of the Indonesian hospital for burial on the 25th day of October 31, 2023 in Gaza City, Gaza.
A man carries an injured Palestinian child as Israeli attacks continue on their 25th day at Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City, Gaza, October 31, 2023
“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. For everyone else it is hell on earth,” said the children’s agency UNICEF, calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
Surgeons are performing amputations without anesthesia on hospital floors and children are being forced to drink salt water, said Jean-Francois Corty, vice president of Médecins Sans Frontières, which has 20 employees on site.
Israel has accused Hamas of using hospitals as military headquarters and civilians as “human shields,” which the group dismisses as “baseless” propaganda.
As even Israel’s staunchest allies expressed concern over the humanitarian crisis in the southern Gaza Strip, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA said there was not nearly enough aid to meet the “unprecedented” needs.
“When an eight-year-old tells you she doesn’t want to die, it’s hard not to feel helpless,” said UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths.
Hisham Adwan, Gaza director of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, where some aid was admitted, said 36 trucks had been waiting there since the previous day.
“I feel like things are going extremely slowly and UNRWA’s work is being disrupted and we don’t know why,” he said.
Israel said it was inspecting the cargo to ensure no weapons were being smuggled and conducting surveillance to ensure Hamas did not seize the supplies.
An image taken from the southern city of Sderot in Israel shows smoke rising during the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip on October 31, 2023.
This image taken on October 31, 2023 from a position along the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel shows clouds of smoke rising during Israeli bombardment amid ongoing fighting between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement
The raid scored an early victory on Monday: the rescue of Private Ori Megidish, an Israeli soldier in Hamas captivity, who was reunited with her family.
But the relatives of another missing woman, 23-year-old German-Israeli Shani Louk, were very sad. She was kidnapped from a music festival and then “tortured and paraded around Gaza,” according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Her remains were found on Monday and her sister Adi expressed her “great sadness” as she shared the news of her death on social media.
Other families endured an unbearable wait for news that their loved ones had been captured by Hamas militants and are believed to be being held in a maze of tunnels in the Gaza Strip.
Hadas Kalderon walked through the burned houses of Kibbutz Nir Oz near Israel’s border with Gaza, where gunmen killed her mother and niece and kidnapped her 12-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
“I have no control or knowledge about the army’s actions, I just know that my children are still in the middle of the war,” said the 56-year-old.
‘It’s a disaster. It really is hell. There is no word to express this.’
On Monday, Hamas released a video purporting to show three female hostages sitting against a tiled wall. One called on Israel to agree to a prisoner exchange demanded by Hamas.
Netanyahu dismissed the clip, whose time and location could not be confirmed, as “cruel psychological propaganda.”
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired drones and missiles at Israel and vowed to continue attacks, a sign that the conflict was threatening to worsen across the region.
The Israeli army also said it intercepted a missile fired from the Red Sea region.
The Israeli military has attacked targets in Syria and traded cross-border fire with Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, whose acting prime minister Najib Mikati told AFP it was his “duty to prevent Lebanon from entering the war.”
Anis Abla, head of the Lebanese Civil Defense Center in Marjayoun, near the Israeli border, said they were completely unprepared for war.
“Our equipment is very primitive and lacks tools such as fire suits and fire extinguisher bottles,” he said.