Israeli airstrikes flattened apartment buildings and damaged other structures in the densely packed Jabaliya refugee camp just outside Gaza City on Tuesday. The Gaza Health Ministry said hundreds of people were injured or killed in the blast, though the Hamas-controlled ministry did not break down the casualties by injury or death, or civilian or Hamas militant. Jabaliya is Gaza's largest refugee camp. Video of the strike's aftermath showed people digging through rubble around a giant crater in the middle of crumbling buildings.
Israel's military said it targeted and killed a senior Hamas commander, along with "dozens" of other fighters, in a "vast underground tunnel complex" that imploded beneath the collapsed buildings. Israeli military spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the commander, Ibrahim Biari, was a key planner of the deadly Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, and Israel's bombs struck between buildings. "We don't intend for the ground to collapse," he told reporters. "But the issue is that Hamas built their tunnels there and that they're running their operations from there."
Another Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, acknowledged to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Israel bombed the area even though it knew civilians could be struck, but he said Israel warned the civilians to move to southern Gaza and insisted the military tries to minimize civilian casualties.
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed in the 25 days since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, including more than 3,500 children. Those numbers, like Israel's claims about the Hamas deaths and Hamas' denial it suffered losses, could not be independently verified. But UNICEF called Gaza "a graveyard for thousands of children" and "a living hell for everyone else."
Israel said more than 1,400 Israelis are dead, mostly civilians killed Oct. 7.
Israel's attacks on civilian areas, and the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, are testing allies and drawing condemnation from critics and human rights groups. Experts in international humanitarian law said Hamas' use of civilians as human shields doesn't absolve Israel of responsibility for protecting civilian lives.
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