A series of Israeli airstrikes hit the densely packed Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza on Tuesday, in what Israel said was an attempt to take out a senior Hamas commander in the area.
The Associated Press reported that at least six Israeli airstrikes hit residential dwellings in the heart of the refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City, citing the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
Gaza officials told Reuters that 50 Palestinians were killed and 150 more wounded. Footage from the scene showed people searching through gutted concrete apartment blocks for loved ones, per Reuters.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday claimed the airstrikes killed Ibrahim Biari, the commander for Hamas’s Central Jabaliya Battalion, along with “neutralizing” an estimated 50 other “terrorists.”
Asked about the Israeli attack on the Jabalya camp later on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said he could not “speak to individual Israeli strikes,” but that the U.S. believes “taking civilian safety into account is both a moral and a strategic obligation.”
Defense officials do “care about civilian casualties, and we’ve made it both clear publicly and privately about our concern for the protection of innocent life and the respect for the law of war,” he told reporters.
Ryder also claimed that the Israeli military is not “deliberately targeting civilians, unlike Hamas,” which “is creating this extra challenge for Israel as they conduct their operations.”
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday pressed IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht on why Israel’s military moved forward with the attacks knowing there were refugees and “innocent civilians” in the area.
“This is the tragedy of war, Wolf,” Hecht responded. “I mean, we as you know, we’ve been saying for days — move south. The civilians [who] are not involved, please move south.”
IDF claimed Biara helped deploy Hamas fighters in the militant group’s Oct. 7 massacre that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel, mostly civilians. And Israeli forces said Biara continued to run Hamas’s military activities in northern Gaza.
Hecht claimed IDF is doing all they can to minimize civilian deaths.
“We again, we were focused on this commander, again you get with that who this man was … [he] killed many, many Israelis,” Hecht said. “We’re doing everything we can … It’s a very complicated battle space, there could be infrastructure there, there could be tunnels there.”
Israel warned more than 1 million Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to move south in recent weeks, ahead of a wider ground incursion into the territory. While some have fled, several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in northern Gaza.
Israeli forces stepped up their military incursion into northern Gaza over the weekend, attacking Hamas militants and infrastructure north of Gaza City. IDF claimed it also has intensified air and naval strikes as part of its ramped up counteroffensive.
“[Hamas] are hiding themselves within [the] civilian population, and again, we’re doing this stage by stage,” Hecht said. “And we’re going to go after every one of those terrorists who were involved [in] that heinous attack on the seventh of October.”
At least 8,525 Palestinians have died in the violence in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. More than 21,500 civilians have been wounded since Oct. 7, the ministry reported, pushing hospitals to the brink of collapse.
—Ellen Mitchell contributed. Updated Tuesday at 4:08 p.m.