The IDF and Shin Bet said Friday that several senior Hamas commanders were killed in recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, including a leader who masterminded the terror group’s use of paragliders to infiltrate Israel on October 7, 2023.
The military also denied allegations that Israeli forces had targeted north Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, amid Palestinian allegations that 29 people were killed there.
The military said Nidal al-Najjar, the commander of Hamas’s aerial forces in Gaza City, was killed in an airstrike Tuesday.
According to the IDF, al-Najjar was among the masterminds behind Hamas’s aerial infiltration of Israel on October 7, 2023, when terrorists in paragliders flew over the border into the south, part of a force that killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
During the ensuing war, al-Najjar was responsible for Hamas’s air defenses and carried out explosive-laden drone attacks against troops operating in Gaza, the IDF said.
Majdi Aqilan, a company commander and deputy commander in Hamas’s Gaza City-based Shati Battalion, was also killed in an airstrike over the past week, the military said.
During the October 7 onslaught, Aqilan was one of the commanders who led the massacre and hostage-taking at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, according to the military.
The destruction caused by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, October 20, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
The strike also killed Mamdouh Mehna, the military said. According to the IDF, Mehna was a senior tunnel specialist in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, and had also participated in the massacre in Nahal Oz.
Ahmed Suwaidan, a company commander in the Shati Battalion, was also killed in the strike, the army said. Suwaidan was involved in abducting Israeli civilians and taking them to Gaza during the Hamas onslaught, according to the IDF.
The army added that the Hamas operatives were also involved in attacks on Israel and troops in Gaza throughout the war.
Dozens said killed at Kamal Adwan, IDF denies targeting hospital
The IDF denied reports it had struck or raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalia, saying it had been operating near the facility.
The area has been the site of an intense IDF operation aiming to stop Hamas from regrouping in northern Gaza for the past two months.
People check the damage outside the Kamal Adwan hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, December 6, 2024. (AFP)
“Contrary to the reports made over the past day, the [military] did not strike the Kamal Adwan hospital or operate within it,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that it would “continue to operate against terror infrastructure and terrorists” in northern Gaza, including “adjacent to” the hospital.
The statement came after the Hamas-run territory’s civil defense agency said 29 people were killed and dozens wounded on Friday by Israeli strikes around the hospital, one of north Gaza’s last functioning health centers.
Mahmud Bassal, the agency’s spokesman, said Israeli troops had entered the hospital, evacuated patients and arrested several Palestinians.
A representative for the World Health Organization told reporters that Israeli troops were first spotted outside the hospital at 4 a.m. and that the hospital was bombed despite there being “no official evacuation order.” The representative said a “substantial amount” of people, including patients and staff, were still in the hospital, which remained “minimum operational.”
According to Hossam Abu Safieh, the hospital’s director, “There was a series of airstrikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital, accompanied by intense and direct fire.”
He added that four staff were killed and there were no surgeons left at the site.
Ambulances transporting wounded Palestinians drive on the main Salah al-Din road in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on December 4, 2024. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP)
Reports of the strikes at Kamal Adwan came just days after the World Health Organization said an emergency medical team had reached the hospital for the first time in 60 days.
Dr. Faradina Sulistiyani, a surgeon on the team, told AFP from Gaza City that all seven of her team members had left the premises on foot as the bombing went on.
Israeli forces have raided Kamal Adwan on several occasions since the start of the war. The hospital said its intensive care unit director Ahmad al-Kahlut was killed in an airstrike late last month.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said only 37 hospitals and clinics in the war-devastated territory remained operational but lacked essential equipment, manpower, and medical and fuel supplies.
The three main hospitals on the enclave’s northern end are barely functioning and have been under repeated attack since Israel sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and nearby Beit Hanoun and Jabalia in October, the ministry said.
Large parts of northern Gaza have been cut off from aid as the IDF operates in those areas against Hamas insurgencies. Most of the civilians there have evacuated but thousands remain under dire conditions.
A truck delivering flour to Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza on December 6, 2024. (COGAT)
Amid the operation, COGAT, the IDF body responsible for humanitarian coordination in Gaza, said it had helped transport thousands of bags of flour to Beit Hanoun.
According to the Hamas health ministry, over 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The figure, which cannot be independently verified, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it killed some 18,000 gunmen in Gaza as of November, in addition to 1,000 inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.
