The Israel Defense Forces announced on Monday that Sgt. Omer Ginzburg, 19, of the Paratroopers Brigade’s 101st Battalion was killed in battle in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday.
Ginzburg, from Kiryat Tivon, was killed in a sniper attack in Khan Yunis that the Hamas terrorist group took responsibility for.
His death brings the IDF’s death toll to 330 since ground forces entered the Gaza Strip on Oct. 27 and to 690 on all fronts since Hamas started the war on Oct. 7 with its bloody invasion of the northwestern Negev.
A total of 4,306 soldiers have been wounded since the beginning of the war, 640 of them seriously. As of now, just over 200 wounded are hospitalized in hospitals across the country, of which 26 are in serious condition.
Israel’s military said on Aug. 9 that troops had started counterterror activities in the Khan Yunis area of the southern Gaza Strip following intelligence reports about renewed enemy activity there.
The IDF issued evacuation orders for the civilian population of the Ajalaa neighborhood in northern Khan Yunis on Sunday morning ahead of a counterterror operation.
Number of terrorists killed in school mosque rises to 38
The IDF on Monday raised the number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists killed in a precision airstrike on a Hamas command and control center in Gaza on Saturday from 19 to 38, Walla News reported.
The command and control center was embedded in a mosque in the Al-Taba’een school compound in Gaza City.
Security forces are continuing to assess the attack, and the number of terrorists killed might rise further.
Immediately after the attack, the Hamas-run Palestinian Civil Defence organization claimed that more than 90 people died in the strike.
However, the IDF refuted the claim.
“The strike was carried out using three precise munitions, which, according to professional analysis, cannot cause the amount of damage that is being reported by the Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza. Furthermore, no severe damage was caused to the compound where the terrorists were situated,” the army said.
“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of a small warhead, aerial surveillance, and intelligence information,” it added.
IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a video statement:
“After we received clear intelligence of the threat posed by these terrorists, and in accordance with international humanitarian law, we took numerous steps to mitigate the risk to civilians. The IDF conducted a precision strike against the terrorists in one specific building of the compound—an area where according to our intelligence, no women and children were present.”
Hagari also said intelligence indicated that there was a “high probability” the strike had killed the commander of Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, Ashraf Juda.
“Increasingly in recent months, Hamas has focused on exploiting school buildings, often where civilians are sheltering inside, to use them as military facilities, command and control centers, for storing weapons, and to execute terrorist attacks,” said Hagari.
