The zionists have given up on defending their genocide.
Now they just own it and brag in other threads.
NETANYAHU DESPERATE TO DECLARE VICTORY IN GAZA SO HE CAN LAUNCH IN LEBANON DESPITE INTERNAL RESISTANCE FROM HIS MILITARY.
The following is from WSJ and not Hamas Ministry of Health. "Area was vaporized".
The Wall Street Journal
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To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs
Story by Dov Lieber, Fatima AbdulKarim, Lara Seligman
• 15h • 5 min read
TEL AVIV—Israel had tried—and failed—to kill Hamas’s top military leader, Mohammed Deif, several times. So when intelligence emerged he was hiding in a compound in southern Gaza, Israel struck with overwhelming force, hitting it with eight 2,000-pound bombs, people familiar with the operation said.
The force of the blast from the precision-guided munitions reduced the target to a smoldering crater. Scores of Palestinians in the area around the compound—which was home to a market, a water source and a soup kitchen serving displaced civilians—were killed and hundreds wounded, Palestinian authorities said.
The bombs hit around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, Israeli military officials said. Mahmoud Abu Amer, who said he was standing about 100 yards away at the time, described the scene as being “like a fiery belt” and said, “I saw people falling in front of me.” Others described a rain of shrapnel.
Israel’s military said it attacked a fenced compound, used by Hamas and manned by militants, and took precautions to limit civilian casualties. It acknowledged the area was surrounded by civilians, but said responsibility for civilian casualties lay with Deif and his fighters for seeking to hide among them.
The commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade, Rafa Salama, was killed in the strike, the Israeli military said. Officials are still assessing whether Deif died but say they are almost certain he did. Several other Hamas members were also killed, local residents said.
To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs© -/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Israel intelligence had been watching the compound because Salama had been using it, a military official said. The strike was set in motion, the official said, when “very, very accurate” intelligence indicated Deif was there. Deif played a key role in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that killed 1,200, officials say.
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The military ran the plans up the chain of command all the way to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and F-35 jets were loaded with the large bombs.
President Biden suspended a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel this spring, arguing they were inappropriate for use in civilian areas. The administration recently began shipping a set of 500-pound bombs that had been suspended at the same time.
Hamas said Deif wasn’t killed by the attack and disputes that he was the target, saying Israel is making excuses for a blast that killed dozens of civilians.
Baha Abu Rukba, a paramedic who lives in a camp near the compound, said he heard an unusual, deafening whistle—the sound of what he thought was a missile streaking by.
He said he began filming with his phone as munitions flew past, followed by a succession of explosions. Shrapnel rained down on the area and smoke filled the air, he said. Abu Rukba and a friend ran to the strike zone to provide first aid and check on family.
“We found the scene like a slaughterhouse,” Abu Rukba said. His friend’s family suffered some injuries but survived. “It’s truly a miracle,” he said.
Gaza health authorities said more than 90 people were killed and 300 were wounded, including many women and children.
Scott Anderson, Gaza-based director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, visited the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis and said he saw patients lying on the floor for lack of space, wounded children including amputees and shortages of equipment.
“I witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen in my nine months in Gaza,” he said in a message from the hospital.
To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs© haitham imad/Shutterstock
To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs© Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Israel had designated the broader area a humanitarian zone and had told civilians to go there in earlier evacuation orders.
The blasts left huge craters where the compound once stood in a wooded area. Wes Bryant, a retired senior targeting professional in the U.S. Air Force, said videos from the scene indicated that multiple 2,000-pound bombs were used.
Bryant said it isn’t unusual to hit high-value targets with two bombs per place of impact. He said the Israeli air force would likely have aimed to hit multiple spots in the compound to ensure the entire area was destroyed and that the targets would be killed wherever they happened to be.
“From a targeting standpoint, multifaceted and spread out, it’s not unprecedented,” he said. “They’re looking at it like, we’re not going to let this guy go.”
Israel’s military had to move quickly. It confirmed there were no hostages on site and formulated an attack.
Amir Avivi, a former deputy commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division who worked on previous assassinations and was also a chief of staff to an Israeli military chief, said experts inside the air force would have immediately begun to work up a plan on how to kill both men with the most powerful and accurate tools available.
Avivi said the air-force team deciding on the ordinance would have calculated Deif’s probability of survival depending on what weapons were used.
“The question is what is the probability you want, 40%, 50% or 100%,” said Avivi, who was briefed on the attack by the military. “Of course, this is matched with the question of civilians being hurt.”
The process can take just minutes, including the involvement of lawyers who sit in the war room, he said.
After Netanyahu made the decision to carry out the attack, the bombs, which had been fitted with JDAM guidance kits to improve their accuracy, were on their way.
Avivi said it was the eighth time Israel had tried to kill Deif, who commands Hamas’s military wing and is credited with transforming it from an insurgent militia into a capable fighting force since taking over in the early 2000s. He is second on Israel’s threat list behind Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.
In 2003, Avivi said, Israel missed a chance to kill a group of Hamas leaders that had gathered in a single apartment in Gaza. There was a debate about using a 2,000-pound bomb, but ultimately the group was targeted with a smaller one to prevent damage to nearby buildings filled with civilians.
To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs© Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
To Target a Top Militant, Israel Rained Down Eight Tons of Bombs© haitham imad/Shutterstock
The intelligence about which floor the Hamas commanders were on turned out to be wrong, allowing them to escape in what is now considered one of the country’s biggest failures in the fight against militants, he said.
This time, Israel chose the bigger bombs. “It’s pretty unusual,” Avivi said about the number of large bombs used. “It’s definitely a very big and unusual one.”
Bryant, the former U.S. Air Force targeting professional, said each impact area would have been hit with at least two bombs nearly simultaneously, one with a heavily delayed fuse, and the other with less of a delay to control the blast radius while ensuring a high degree of destruction.
“If you just drop one, especially delayed, you’d see a lot more rubble,” he said.
Instead, the area was vaporized. Bryant said such violent explosions make it difficult to identify bodies, requiring investigators to look for DNA or personal effects like cellphones.
“I’m not sure there is a body to find,” Avivi said.
Write to Dov Lieber at
dov.lieber@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at
lara.seligman@wsj.com
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