Airstrikes on Gaza have killed dozens of Hamas commanders, Israel claims

Israeli airstrikes in Gaza have killed dozens of Hamas commanders as troops advance deeper into the battered territory, with some fighting in “the heart of Gaza City”, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) officials and analysts have said.

- Jason Burke

However, there were doubts over the importance of the dead commanders within Hamas, and analysts said there was no obvious sign that the organisation had yet been significantly weakened.

Israeli leaders swore to crush Hamas after the extremist Islamist organisation launched terrorist attacks from Gaza into southern Israel, killing 1,400 people in their homes and at a dance party on 7 October. Most of those who died were civilians, and including many young children and older people.

Since then, an Israeli ground and air offensive has wrought massive destruction across Gaza, displacing at least 1.3 million people and killing 10,569 – including 4,324 children and 2,823 women – according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the territory.

Analysts said the mission of the Israeli armed forces is to kill all the senior leaders of Hamas, to destroy its capacity to pose any future threat.

“Right now the IDF is trying to translate the terms ‘erasing’ or ‘crushing’ Hamas into concrete results, so that means destroying all military infrastructure and killing leaders, not just the heads of brigade, field commanders and so on but also the members of the political bureau too,” said Dr Michael Milstein, a Hamas expert at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Hamas spokesmen have denied Israeli forces had made major advances. “I challenge [Israel] if it has been able, to this moment, to record any military achievement on the ground other than killing civilians,” the senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera television.