ISRAEL'S foreign minister has confirmed that Israeli troops in Gaza have killed Hamas’s top leader Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of last year’s attack on Israel that sparked the war.
Sinwar has topped Israel’s most wanted list since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war just over a year ago, and his killing strikes a powerful blow to the militant group.
There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.
Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its retaliatory campaign in Gaza. Sinwar has been in hiding throughout the war.
For years, a senior figure in Hamas, Sinwar was chosen as its top leader following the assassination of Ismael Haniyeh in July in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran.
Israel has also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’s military wing Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.
The report came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the Abu Hussein school was hit on Thursday.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of Gaza health ministry’s local emergency unit, confirmed the death toll from the strike and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command centre run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside the school.
It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in.
It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza.
The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
In a separate development, a building in central Beirut that houses offices of the Al Jazeera news network and the Norwegian embassy was evacuated after a warning.
Mazen Ibrahim, Al Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief, said the building’s administration had received three calls telling everyone to leave the property, which he said also houses the embassies of Norway and Azerbaijan, as well as dozens of offices.
He said it was unclear who called in the warning.
Norwegian foreign ministry spokesperson Ragnhild Simenstad said the building was evacuated after a “bomb threat”, without elaborating.
Israel has ordered the evacuation of several buildings, as well as entire cities, towns and villages, as it strikes what it says are targets linked to the Hezbollah militant group.
There have also been several instances of evacuation warning calls and text messages that turned out to be bogus, which Lebanese security agencies said they were investigating.
