Israeli strikes killed at least 17 people in Gaza City on Saturday, Palestinian emergency workers said, a day after Israel ended a policy of pausing its attacks in the area for several hours daily to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian relief.
One of the attacks targeted a “key” Hamas figure, the Israeli military said in a statement. According to three Israeli officials, the strike targeted Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing. All three spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.
It was not immediately clear whether Israel had succeeded in killing Abu Obeida, which is a nom de guerre. Mr. Obeida frequently appears, masked and defiant, in videos disseminated by Hamas, making him one of the group’s best-known representatives in the Arab world.
At least five people were killed in the attack, which took place in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense rescue service.
In a separate strike near a bakery, an additional 12 people were killed, said Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of the city’s Al Shifa hospital.
Neither toll could be independently verified. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the second strike.
Israel is gearing up for another sweeping offensive in Gaza, with the stated aim of taking over Gaza City. Several hundred thousand Palestinians are still in the city; Israeli officials say they want as many as possible to flee beforehand for their own safety.
Gaza’s two million people have faced severe hunger, with many people not eating for multiple days in a row at times, according to the United Nations World Food Program. This month, a U.N.-backed panel of experts said Gaza City and the surrounding area were suffering from famine — a characterization Israel that has disputed.
At the end of July, amid mounting international outrage over the conditions in Gaza, Israel said it would pause its attacks in several parts of the enclave, including Gaza City, for much of the day to allow humanitarian aid to enter.
But on Friday, the Israeli military said it would resume operations during those hours in Gaza City, in an apparent effort to pressure Palestinians to evacuate the area.
Aid officials say food prices in Gaza have fallen over the past few weeks, although there are still severe food shortages. They also warn that a large-scale evacuation of Gaza City could erase any glimmers of progress in staving off more malnutrition, particularly as there is nowhere left to go in the devastated enclave.
“It is impossible that a mass evacuation of Gaza City could ever be done in a way that is safe and dignified under the current conditions,” Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement on Saturday.
“Such an evacuation would trigger a massive population movement that no area in the Gaza Strip can absorb, given the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and the extreme shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care,” she added.
Israel’s campaign has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel.
In the wake of the Hamas-led attack, Israeli leaders vowed to eliminate the Palestinian group in Gaza. But despite repeatedly invading almost every corner of the Gaza Strip and assassinating numerous Hamas leaders, that goal remains elusive.
Hamas has fought a dogged insurgency and continued to recruit new fighters to its ranks, according to Israeli and U.S. officials. The armed group also still holds about 20 living hostages seized during the Oct. 7 attacks, in addition to the bodies of around 28 others.
On Saturday night, the Israeli military announced that a reserve soldier was killed in southern Gaza, bringing the total number of Israeli soldiers killed to about 900 since the beginning of the war.
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
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