Israel is not yet certain whether Mohammed Deif, the military leader of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, was actually killed in an airstrike.
“There is still no absolute certainty,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a news conference in Tel Aviv.
The military had earlier announced that it was still investigating whether Deif and Rafa Salama, the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade, were killed in the airstrike west of Khan Younis.
A few hours earlier, the Israeli army had bombed a fenced-off structure in the humanitarian zone between Khan Younis and al-Mawasi, which Israel claims served as a base for Hamas terrorists.
According to the Hamas-controlled health authority, 90 people were killed and another 300 injured in the attack.
The military had highly reliable information that Deif and Salama were at the base at the time of the attack, a senior military official said during an online briefing for journalists.
The information from all sides could not initially be independently verified.
