Israeli planes dropped leaflets over southern Gaza on Saturday showing a picture of the dead Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar with the message that “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza,” echoing language used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The move came as Israeli military strikes reportedly killed at least 32 people across the Gaza Strip and tightened a siege around hospitals in Jabalya in the north of the enclave, Palestinian health officials said. The statement did not differentiate how many of those were civilians and how many were Hamas terrorists. The IDF said it was unaware of the incident.
“Whoever drops the weapon and hands over the hostages will be allowed to leave and live in peace,” the leaflet, written in Arabic, read, according to residents of the southern city of Khan Yunis and images circulating online.
The leaflet’s wording was from a statement by Netanyahu on Thursday after Sinwar was killed by Israeli soldiers operating in Rafah, in the south near the Egyptian border, on Wednesday.
Residents and medics said Israeli forces had tightened their siege on Jabalya, the largest of the enclave’s eight historic camps, which it encircled by also sending tanks to nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya and issuing evacuation orders to residents.
Israeli officials said evacuation orders were aimed at separating Hamas fighters from civilians and denied that there was any systematic plan to clear civilians out of Jabalia or other northern areas.
Killing Sinwar
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by the IDF in Tel Sultan in Rafah on Wednesday in an unplanned operation.
IDF troops suspected there were Hamas terrorists in the building area which they eventually fired on. Afterward, they found Sinwar’s body inside.
One of the terrorists targeted in the IDF strike in Gaza was Hamas’s Khan Yunis division commander, who has been in close proximity to Sinwar since the start of the war.
The IDF also believes that Sinwar stayed in the same tunnel complex a few hundred meters away from the six slain hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Ori Danino, who were being held in Rafah. According to the IDF, after the hostages were executed in late August, he started to move without other hostages as human shields.
The Oct. 7 attack Sinwar planned on Israeli communities a year ago killed around 1,200 people, with another 253 dragged back to Gaza as hostages. 101 hostages remain in Hamas captivity until today.
Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.
