Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s 3 sons killed in Israeli attack on Gaza City

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, relatives and Hamas state media said, with Haniyeh accusing Israel of acting in a “spirit of revenge and murder.”

Haniyeh confirmed the deaths in an interview with Al Jazeera satellite channel on Wednesday, saying his son “was martyred on the road to the liberation of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

“Criminal enemies are driven by a spirit of revenge and murder and have no respect for any standards or laws,” he said in a telephone interview.

Ismail Haniyeh lives in exile in Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.

He said the killings would not force Hamas to soften its stance. The two sides have been negotiating a ceasefire for months.

“The enemy believes that by targeting leaders’ families, they will force them to abandon the demands of our people,” he said. “Anyone who thinks that targeting my son will force Hamas to change its position is delusional.”

Hamas al-Aqsa TV said Hazim, Amir and Mohammad Haniyeh and their families were killed in the strike near the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City. Ismail Haniyeh is from Shati.

Al-Aqsa TV said the brothers were traveling in a car with their family when they were attacked by an Israeli drone. A total of six people were allegedly killed, including a daughter of Hazem Haniyeh and Amir’s son and daughter.

The attack comes as international mediators have been trying to broker a new ceasefire. It’s unclear what impact the strike will have on those negotiations.

Earlier, Israel’s war cabinet minister Benny Gantz claimed that Hamas had been defeated militarily, although he also said Israel would fight it for years to come.

Gantz said in a statement to the media in Sderot that “from a military perspective, Hamas has been defeated. Its fighters have been eliminated or gone into hiding” and its capabilities have been ‘weakened’.

But, he added: “The fight against Hamas will take time. Boys who are now in middle school will still be fighting in the Gaza Strip”.

Gantz reiterated the Israeli government’s commitment to the city of Rafah in the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, where more than half of the population is currently seeking refuge. “Wherever there are terrorist targets, the IDF will be there,” he said.

The attack came as Palestinians in Gaza were celebrating a quiet Eid al-Fitr holiday, ending the holy month of Ramadan, and visiting the graves of relatives killed in the war. In the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City, people sat quietly in graves as surrounding buildings were destroyed by an Israeli offensive launched in response to a deadly Hamas attack on October 7.

Separately, U.S. President Joe Biden called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the Gaza war a mistake and called on his administration to provide significant aid to the troubled territory, increasing pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire and widening rifts among stalwarts. allies.

Biden has been an outspoken supporter of Israel’s war against Hamas. But his patience with Netanyahu has appeared to be wearing thin in recent weeks, and his government has taken a harsher stance against Israel, undermining the two countries’ decades-long alliance and deepening Israel’s international isolation from the war. .

The most serious disagreement concerns Israel’s plans for an offensive against Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. An Israeli airstrike last week on an aid convoy killed seven staff members of the World Central Kitchen charity, most of them foreigners, further exacerbating the rift between the two countries. Israel said the deaths were unintentional, but Biden was outraged.

Biden’s latest comments, made in an interview on Tuesday night, two days after the WCK attack, underscored differences between Israel and the United States over delivering humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, where the war has led to warnings of looming famine for more than a million people. .

Asked whether Netanyahu was putting his political survival ahead of Israel’s interests, Biden told Spanish-language broadcaster Univision: “What he did was a mistake. I don’t agree with what he did.”

Israel stopped sending aid to Gaza early in the war but, under pressure from the United States, slowly increased the number of trucks it allowed into the area. Still, aid groups say supplies are not reaching desperate people quickly enough, blaming Israeli restrictions and pointing to thousands of trucks waiting to enter Gaza. Countries have tried less efficient ways to deliver aid, including airdrops and shipping.

Israel said it had opened more entry points to allow trucks to enter and reach hard-hit areas such as northern Gaza, an early Israeli target in the war. Israel also accuses aid groups of being too slow to get aid into Gaza.

Aid groups say logistical problems and a precarious security situation, highlighted by the WCK strike, complicate deliveries.

Israel and Hamas are negotiating to achieve a ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages taken by Hamas and others on October 7. But the two sides remain far apart on key issues, including the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza. Netanyahu’s security cabinet met late Tuesday to discuss hostage negotiations, but no decision appeared to have been made.

Netanyahu has vowed to achieve “total victory”, pledging to destroy Hamas’s military and governance capabilities to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 7 attack and return the hostages. He said victory must include an attack on Rafah, which Israel says is Hamas’s last major stronghold but where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are currently seeking asylum.

Six months into the war, Israel has become increasingly isolated, with even its closest partners increasingly vocal about their displeasure with the direction of the war, while long-time trading partners such as Turkey have taken potentially painful economic measures to express dissatisfaction.

Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, is under pressure to decide on Gaza’s post-war vision. But critics say he is delaying because he does not want to anger his ultranationalist governing partners, who support the resettlement of Gaza. Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip in 2005, an idea Netanyahu has ruled out.

Netanyahu’s governing partners also oppose major concessions to Hamas and have threatened to quit the government, a move that would collapse the ruling coalition and trigger new elections.

According to Israeli authorities, Israel launched the war in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas, in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 people hostage.

More than 33,400 Palestinians have been killed in the relentless fighting, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its tally but says most of the dead are women and children. Israel says it has killed about 12,000 militants but has provided no evidence.

The war caused a humanitarian disaster. Much of the territory’s population has been displaced, and large swathes of Gaza’s urban landscape have been leveled in the fighting, leaving many areas uninhabitable.