Sunday, 31 August 2025
Sunday, 31 August 2025
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced Sunday that a spokesperson for Hamas' armed wing, Abu Obeida, was killed in Gaza over the weekend.
Obeida's last statement was on Friday as Israel began the initial stages of a new military offensive in Gaza City, declaring the area a combat zone. Hamas has not commented on Israel's claim.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier said Israel had attacked Obeida, the longtime spokesperson for Hamas' Qassam Brigades, but did not know whether he had been killed.
“I do notice there is no one addressing this question on the Hamas side,” Netanyahu told ministers at a weekly cabinet meeting.
Obeida is the latest Hamas representative targeted and killed by Israel as it attempts to dismantle the group's military capacity and prevent an attack like October 7, 2023, when militants abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Israel has assassinated many of Hamas' top military and political leadership.
'A death trap'
At least 43 Palestinians were killed since Saturday, most of them in Gaza City, according to local hospitals. Shifa Hospital — the territory's largest — said 29 bodies had been brought to its morgue, including 10 people killed while seeking aid and others struck across the city.
On Sunday morning, hospital officials reported 11 more fatalities from strikes and gunfire. Al-Awda Hospital said seven of them were civilians trying to reach aid.
Witnesses said Israeli troops opened fire on crowds in the Netzarim Corridor, an Israeli military zone that bisects Gaza.
“We were trying to get food, but we were met with the occupation's bullets,” said Ragheb Abu Lebda, from Nuseirat, who saw at least three people bleeding from gunshot wounds. “It's a death trap.”
The corridor has become increasingly perilous, with civilians killed while approaching UN convoys overwhelmed by looters and desperate crowds, or shot on their way to sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed US contractor. Neither the foundation nor the Israeli military responded to questions about Sunday's casualties.
Malnutrition and displacement
Israel has for weeks been operating on the outskirts of Gaza City as well as the Jabaliya refugee camp to prepare for the initial stages of its offensive, which it announced on Friday. Its military has since intensified its air attacks in coastal areas of the city, including Rimal.
Its Arabic-language army spokersperson has urged the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still in Gaza City to flee south, but only tens of thousands have done so. Many say they are too exhausted after repeated displacements or unconvinced that anywhere is safer.
The United Nations says roughly 65,000 Palestinians have fled their homes since August 1, including 23,199 in the past week. Many are living in temporary shelters after multiple displacements. More than 90 per cent of the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced at least once during the war, and many multiple times, according to the UN.
Israel has announced new infrastructure projects in southern Gaza and signalled that aid to Gaza City could be cut — steps Palestinians say amount to forced displacement.
Israel has for weeks been operating on the outskirts of Gaza City as well as the Jabaliya refugee camp. It also intensified its air attacks in the coastal areas of the city.
Seven Palestinian adults died of causes related to malnutrition and starvation in the Gaza Strip over the last 24 hours, the territory's health ministry reported Sunday.
That has brought the death toll from malnutrition-related causes to 215 since late June when the ministry started to count fatalities among this age category, it said.
Another 124 children died of malnutrition-related causes since the start of the war in October 2023, the ministry said.
At least 63,371 Palestinians have died in Gaza during the war, said the ministry, which does not say how many are fighters or civilians but says around half have been women and children.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The UN and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes the figures but has not provided its own.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a "dangerous combat zone".
"They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave," said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu's security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas' last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in. On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the Gaza Strip is equipped to absorb, amid severe shortages of food, shelter, and medical supplies.
"People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others including myself didn't find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded," said Ghada, a mother of five from the city's Sabra neighborhood. Around half of the enclave's more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave, according to local sources.
Israel's military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.
Large crowds demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening, and hostages’ families protested outside the homes of ministers on Sunday morning. The war began with a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 taken hostage. Twenty of the remaining 48 hostages are believed to still be alive.
Israel's military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 63,000 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health officials, and it has plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis and left much of it in ruins.
