The armed wing of the Palestinian movement Hamas announced on Sunday the deaths of the military commander of the North Gaza Brigade and three other senior leaders during the Israeli offensive on Palestinian territory.
Ahmed al-Ghandour was a member of the Hamas military council and had been designated a “terrorist” by US authorities since 2017, particularly for his role in the 2006 attack on the Israeli army at the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. in the extreme south of the Palestinian territory.
He had long been targeted by the Israeli army and had lost two of his children in attacks before the current offensive.
Among the three other executives named in the press release is Ayman Siam, who is introduced as the head of the missile launch units. “We swear before God that we will continue their path and that their blood will be a light for the Mujahideen and a fire against the occupiers,” Al-Qassam Brigades added in its press release.
Hamas rarely communicates about its dead. However, the movement had already announced the death of Aymane Nofal, a commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, in an attack by the Israeli army on the Bureij refugee camp (center) in mid-October.
The Israeli army confirmed this, adding that Nofal “led numerous attacks against Israel,” “supervised the production of weapons” and “was involved in organizing the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit,” a captured Israeli soldier in 2006, in 2011 was released.
According to Israeli authorities, the October 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people, the vast majority civilians, representing unprecedented violence in the country’s history.
In retaliation, Israel pledged to “eliminate” Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, to relentlessly bomb Palestinian territory and to launch a ground offensive on October 27 until the ceasefire on Friday started.
According to the Hamas government, nearly 15,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli strikes.
Last week, a senior Israeli military official spoke of the deaths of “more than 50” Hamas commanders since the war began. The figure could not be independently verified by AFP.