The newly appointed head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Odeh, has been killed in a strike in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday – days after his predecessor died in a similar attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and the Israel Defense Forces said Odeh was one of the key planners behind the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel. Israeli officials described him as an “architect” of Hamas military operations and said the strike was based on intelligence gathered by the IDF and Shin Bet security agency.
Odeh, a former Hamas intelligence chief, reportedly succeeded Izz al-Din al-Haddad as the head of the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian group.
Al-Haddad was killed in an Israeli strike earlier this month, although Hamas did not officially confirm the appointment.
“The commander of Hamas terror organisation’s military arm number 4 in Gaza was eliminated yesterday and sent to meet his partners in the depths of hell,” Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz wrote on X on Wednesday.
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas said the Israeli army killed Odeh, his wife and two of his sons in a strike that targeted a residential building in Gaza City the previous day alongside dozens more.
Tuesday’s strike hit the upper three floors of the al-Kayali building in the centre of Gaza City, where streets were busy with shoppers ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
Rescue teams rushed to the scene of the strikes but struggled to reach the upper floors because of the scale of the damage and congestion in the area.
Witnesses said at least five missiles struck the building almost simultaneously from different directions.
One resident said he heard the sound of a helicopter hovering overhead before the attack.
Footage from the scene showed ambulances and civil defence crews searching through the damaged building as crowds gathered nearby.
A statement from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet said: “As part of the joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet to eliminate the terrorist Mohammed Odeh, several buildings in the heart of Gaza City that served as a hideout for him were attacked, after months of intelligence surveillance in order to track his movements and the movements of his assistants in the organisation.”
They added that they had also struck “a nearby apartment belonging to a Hamas terrorist who raided on October 7 and was part of Odeh’s circle of assistants”, referring to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
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