New Israeli strike kills Islamic Jihad commander in Gaza
Jerusalem/Gaza, May 11 (EFE).- Israel continued to bomb targets of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror group in the Gaza Strip early Thursday, leaving three dead, including a top PIJ commander, and 15 injured, official sources reported.
A total of 25 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel began conducting airstrikes on Tuesday.
“We just targeted Ali Ghali, the commander of Islamic Jihad’s Rocket Launching Force, as well as two other Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Twitter.
Ghali was hiding in an apartment in Khan Younis in southern Gaza along with his brother, Mahmoud Ghali, and nephew, Mahmoud Mansoor, who were also killed, the IDF added.
“Ghali was entrusted with all the routine activity of the force and held a central role in the instruction and launching of rocket fire toward Israel, including the recent barrage of rockets toward Israeli territory,” according to the IDF.
Meanwhile, Palestinian security sources said that Ali Ghali was killed after two Israeli drones attacked his apartment.
Doctors from the Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, confirmed that three Palestinians were brought to the hospital already dead and that another 15 people were injured in the same attack.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the PIJ, said in a statement that Ali Ghali “was assassinated in the south of the Gaza Strip along with other martyrs.”
A total of 469 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, some of which hit the Israeli cities of Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv.
For its part, the Israeli army has bombed at least 134 PIJ targets in the Strip – including military command centers, rocket manufacturing sites, missile launching platforms and weapons depots – under its “Shield and Arrow” air strike operation, launched on Tuesday.
A total of 25 Palestinians have been killed in the strikes, including ten militants and 15 civilians, six of them children. The number of people wounded in Gaza now stands at 79.
Efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations to broker a truce have not borne fruit so far.
The latest escalation erupted a week after a short spike in violence in the area, which included the firing of more than 100 rockets from Gaza following the death of a prominent prisoner, Khader Adnan, who had been on a hunger strike for 87 days to protest his detention by Israel.
The current situation is reminiscent of the hostilities between the Israeli military and the PIJ in August 2022, also after the killing of senior members of the group by Israel.
That escalation left some 50 Palestinians dead in Gaza. EFE
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