June 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Israeli Army detailed this Thursday that at least nine members of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Palestinian Jihad died during their attack on a school of the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
Among them are three members of the Nujba forces, the elite military unit of the Ezzeldin al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas: Mosab Hafez Darwish, Rashed Bubly and Salem Afesh, the latter also a militant of Islamic Jihad.
“They were planning and carrying out attacks from inside the classrooms of this UNRWA school. Our precise attack was based on concrete intelligence from multiple sources,” Army spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a statement.
Hagari has indicated that some of these “terrorists” participated in the attacks on October 7 and has assured that they were planning “more attacks against Israelis, some of them imminent.” “We were able to stop a ticking time bomb,” she added.
Likewise, he highlighted that the operation was carried out once Israeli Intelligence determined “that there were no women or children inside the compound” and that they had to delay it up to two times when identifying civilians in the area.
The Israeli Army spokesperson has also assured that “despite the complex operational situation”, the Israeli Air Force carried out “precise” attacks against three of the school classrooms where the Palestinian militiamen were hiding.
“This is the fifth time we have had to attack Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists operating from inside UNRWA facilities,” he said, adding that the Palestinian militia “wage war from schools and hospitals.”
According to the authorities of the enclave, at least 40 Palestinians have died in this attack, including fourteen children. “The Israeli occupation Army has committed these massacres repeatedly and brutally and even though it knew of the presence of tens of thousands of displaced people in these centers,” they warned.
The Nuseirat camp, created in 1970, housed some 80,200 refugees before the outbreak of the conflict, according to UNRWA data, and houses 15 school buildings, a food distribution center, two health centers, two social services offices and a maintenance and sanitation office.
The camp, like those of Bureij and Maghazi, is in the center of the Gaza Strip – in the province of Deir al Balá -. Both the city of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij camp have been targeted since Tuesday by a new Israeli military operation with the declared objective of destroying Hamas’ “terrorist infrastructure.”
The Israeli Army already participated in clashes with Hamas in Bureij in January, although until now it had not launched a ground operation against Deir al-Balá, which was nevertheless the target of numerous bombings within the framework of the offensive unleashed against the enclave after the attacks carried out on October 7 by Hamas and other Palestinian factions, which left some 1,200 dead and nearly 240 kidnapped.
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