An Israeli Air Force strike in Gaza City on July 31 killed Ismail al-Ghoul, a senior Hamas operative who took part in the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 invasion, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed on Thursday.
Al-Ghoul, who doubled as a journalist for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, participated in the murderous onslaught and instructed other terrorists on how to record and distribute videos of their attacks, the IDF said.
The statement stressed that the activities of al-Ghoul, a member of Hamas’s elite Nukba Force that led the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israeli communities, were a “vital part” of the Islamist movement’s terrorist actions.
“The IDF and Shin Bet will continue to operate to eliminate terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre,” the army said.
The IDF clarification came after the Committee to Protect Journalists called on Israel to explain the deaths of the Al Jazeera reporter and cameraman Ramy El-Rify as they were en route to film near a house belonging to slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran this week.
While combat operations in the Strip have largely winded down amid increasing threats on Israel’s border with Lebanon, IDF troops continue to operate against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza.
On Friday, the military announced that an IAF strike killed Muhammad al-Jabar, a senior Islamic Jihad commander responsible for the Iran-backed terrorist organization’s weapons manufacturing unit.
Al-Jabari managed the “production of weapons in northern Gaza, distribution of salaries and money to the organization’s terrorists, and took an active part in the attempt to restore the organization’s rocket production capabilities and infrastructure,” the IDF statement said.
The IDF carried out “many steps” to mitigate harm to noncombatants, including through aerial surveillance and precision munitions, it said.
Meanwhile, troops of the IDF’s 162nd Armored Division killed more than 30 armed terrorists in close-quarters combat and by calling in airstrikes in Gaza’s southernmost Hamas stronghold of Rafah.
In the Netzarim Corridor, which divides northern Gaza from its south, troops ordered a drone strike after they saw a squad of enemy gunmen emerge from an attack tunnel. A helicopter gunship also struck a building used to store munitions in the vicinity of the Gaza corridor, the army said.
Israeli ground forces entered the Gaza Strip on Oct. 27 following weeks of airstrikes in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led massacre, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and abducted more than 250 men, women and children to the enclave.
