Sister of Hamas leader and nine other relatives killed in Israeli airstrike

An Israeli airstrike killed ten family members of a senior Hamas terror chief, including one of his sisters, health officials in the Gaza Strip said on Tuesday.

Relatives of Qatar-based Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh were evacuated when Israeli forces bombed their home in the Al-Shati refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, family members and medics said.

“The attack left ten martyrs, including Zahr Haniyeh, the sister of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh,” Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for civil defense in the Hamas-ruled area, told Agence France-Presse.

He added that numerous bodies were likely still buried under the rubble, but they lacked the necessary equipment to dig them out.

Haniyeh, who heads Hamas’s diplomatic mission and is the public face of the group that controls the Gaza Strip, has lost numerous family members in Israeli airstrikes since the October 7 terrorist attacks.

Three of his sons and four grandchildren were killed in a single attack in central Gaza in April.

The terror leader said at the time that about 60 of his family members had been killed since the outbreak of the war.

The latest attack was one of three separate airstrikes by Israeli forces on Tuesday that killed at least 24 Palestinians, health officials in the Gaza Strip said.

The other airstrikes hit two schools in Gaza City, killing at least 14 people, local medics said.

The Israeli military confirmed that two of the buildings were school premises, but said the buildings were “used by Hamas as a shield for its terrorist activities.”

In the strikes, the Israeli Air Force targeted militants involved in planning the attacks on Israel, including some involved in the hostage-taking and others involved in the October 7 cross-border bloodshed, military officials added.

Hamas denies using civilian facilities such as schools and hospitals for military purposes and described the attacks on the two schools and the house in Al-Shati camp as a “massacre”.

Meanwhile, Israeli tanks also penetrated deeper into the western areas of Rafah in the south of the enclave overnight – and, according to residents, blew up houses there.

The armed wings of Hamas and its allied Islamic Jihad groups said in a joint statement that their fighters fired mortar shells at Israeli forces in the Yibna district of eastern Rafah overnight.

And in nearby Khan Younis, medics said an Israeli tank attack had injured several people in a tent camp in the west of the city.

With post wires