(Gaza) Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip announced the death of ten members of the family of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed Tuesday in an Israeli army strike on a refugee camp in Gaza City.
Zahr Haniyeh, the sister of the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, was killed in this raid on the Chati camp, said Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the Civil Defense.
According to this source, nine other people died and others were injured. The bodies were transported to Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.
“A number of martyrs are still under the rubble,” Bassal told AFP. “We have difficulty [finding them] because of the lack of equipment and fuel.”
Asked by AFP, the Israeli army indicated that it was unable to confirm this information.
In a statement released Tuesday, Hamas denounced the bombing of the Haniyeh family home, which it said adds to the list of “massacres” committed by Israel in the Palestinian territory.
According to the Islamist movement, these acts show that Israel “continues to defy all international laws, norms and human values, by deliberately targeting innocent civilians and committing the most horrific massacres against them.”
In April, three sons and four grandchildren of Mr. Haniyeh, who lives in exile in Qatar, were killed in a strike in the Chati camp. The army confirmed that it had killed the three sons, described as “military agents of the Hamas terrorist organization”, in an airstrike.
Ismaïl Haniyeh then indicated that around 60 members of his family had been killed since the start of the war on October 7.
The latest report from the Hamas government, in power in Gaza since 2007, shows 37,626 deaths since that date, the majority of them civilians.
The war was sparked by the unprecedented attack by Islamist movement commandos on Israeli soil on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data Israelis.
