The Israeli military announced on Thursday the “elimination” of Rawhi Mushtaha, the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, and two senior security officials during airstrikes it conducted three months ago.
In the statement from the military, it said that it attacked an underground compound in northern Gaza, which was used as a control and command center. The report says Mushtaha was accompanied by commanders Sameh al-Siraj and Sami Oudeh at the facility during the attack.
Mushtaha was one of Hamas’s most senior operatives, playing a major role in the decision-making process on the deployment of the group’s forces, the statement said. Sameh al-Siraj headed the security portfolio in Hamas’s political bureau.
Mushtaha was known to be an acquaintance of Yahya Sinwar, the most senior Hamas official suspected to have orchestrated the attack on Israel last October 7, which ignited the current war. Sinwar is presumed to be still alive and in hiding in Gaza.
Earlier in the day Thursday, Hamas-controlled media and medical sources claimed that Israel killed Abdel-Aziz Salha, a Hamas militant from the West Bank, in an airstrike. Salha had been serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 2000 lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah but was released in a 2011 prisoner swap. Medics reported that he was killed in a strike on a tent sheltering displaced Palestinians at Al-Aklouk School in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza.
The 2000 attack had occurred in Ramallah, where a mob had attacked two Israeli reservists after they were captured at a Palestinian checkpoint and taken to a police station. The mob then killed the two Israeli reservists.
