The Israeli military launched an additional airstrike near emergency responders during a deadly barrage on a villa in Gaza this weekend aimed at the top Hamas military commander in the territory, videos and photographs reviewed by The New York Times show.
After several Israeli munitions hit the grounds of the villa in the Al-Mawasi area Saturday morning, at least one additional, smaller missile hit a busy street outside the compound as emergency service workers were responding. It exploded directly in front of two vehicles clearly marked as belonging to Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, spraying them with shrapnel and apparently killing and injuring first responders.
The Israeli military said that it had “struck military targets of the utmost significance” but that the strike “will be examined.”
Israeli officials said the initialstrike, which targeted the Hamas commander Muhammad Deif, hit the compound with at least five precision-guided missiles. The blast near the rescue workers was nearly 100 yards away from the entrance to the compound, suggesting a separate strike.
In comparison with the first strike, which destroyed a building and buried Palestinians inside an enormous crater, the second was significantly smaller. Videos show the strike and its immediate aftermath from three different angles. All the videos show a plume of white smoke rising from a street crowded with rescuers, bystanders and people injured in the first strike.
In two of the videos, a loud whooshing sound can be heard before the explosion, indicating an airstrike, rather than an artillery blast or an explosion on the ground, said Wes Bryant, a retired U.S. Air Force master sergeant who was responsible for choosing targets and assessing civilian casualties during the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Mr. Bryant and Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, said that shrapnel damage seen on one of the Civil Defense vehicles and two cars near the blast was consistent with a Spike or Mikholit missile, two munitions used by the Israeli military.
Both experts also said the Civil Defense vehicles would have been clearly visible to the soldiers launching the strikes. Mr. Bryant said that, in the Israeli military’s calculus, “any Hamas targets carry enough military necessity that any civilian loss is considered proportional.”
In the aftermath of the two blasts, videos captured people carrying dozens of dead and injured away from the scene, some of them in bright orange Gaza Civil Defense vests.
An aerial image of the first strike published by the Israeli military and analyzed by The Times indicates the resulting crater was close to 60 feet in diameter, indicative of a 2,000-pound bomb. President Biden has paused the delivery of these weapons to Israel since May over concerns about the civilian casualties they might cause.
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