MUWASI, Gaza Strip — Hamas said Sunday that ceasefire talks in Gaza are continuing and that the group’s military commander is in good health, a day after the Israeli army struck Mohammed Deif in a massive airstrike that killed at least 90 people, including children, according to local health officials.
Deif’s condition remained unclear after the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night that “there is still no absolute certainty” that he had been killed. Hamas officials offered no evidence to support their claim about the health of a key architect of the October 7 attack that sparked the war.
The Israeli military said Sunday that Rafa Salama, a Hamas commander it described as one of Deif’s closest associates, was killed in Saturday’s attack. Salama commanded Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade. The statement gave no update on Deif, who has long topped Israel’s most wanted list and has been in hiding for years.
Hamas rejected the idea that brokered ceasefire talks had been suspended after the strike. Spokesman Jihad Taha said “there is no doubt that the horrific massacres will affect all efforts in the negotiations,” but added that “the efforts and efforts of the mediators are still ongoing.”
Deif’s killing would be Israel’s highest-profile assassination of a Hamas leader since the war began. It would be a huge victory for Israel and a deep psychological blow to the militant group. Netanyahu said all Hamas leaders were “marked for death” and claimed that killing them would bring Hamas closer to accepting a ceasefire deal.
Hamas political officials insisted that communication channels between leaders inside and outside Gaza were still functional after the attack in the south of the territory. Witnesses said it happened in an area that Israel had designated as safe for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. The Israeli military would not confirm that.
On Sunday, some survivors were angry that the attack on Deif came unexpectedly, in an area they had heard was safe.
“I heard the first blow and my son came screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and took cover with me,” said Mahmoud Abu Yaseen, who held his children but woke up in hospital to find his son dead. The family had been displaced five times since the war began. “Where are we going?” he asked.
A United Nations official described the chaos at Nasser Hospital, where the victims were taken. Many were treated on the bloodstained floor, with few supplies available.
“I witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen in my nine months in Gaza,” Scott Anderson said in a statement. “I saw toddlers who had been amputated twice, children who were paralyzed and unable to receive treatment, and others who had been separated from their parents.” He said restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza were hampering efforts to provide needed medical and other care.
On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the pilots who carried out the attack, saying Hamas is being eroded every day, without the ability to arm itself, organize or “care for the wounded.”
The attack wounded at least 300 people. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the nine-month war that began after Hamas launched an Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 200 hostages.
More than 38,400 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli ground offensives and bombardments since then, according to the territory’s health ministry. The ministry makes no distinction between fighters and civilians in its count.
On Sunday, an Israeli strike in Nuseirat in central Gaza killed at least 14 people at the gate of a school used as a shelter for displaced people, an Associated Press journalist who visited two hospitals said. Children were among the 15 others who were wounded. The Israeli military said in a statement that it had attacked “terrorists” operating in the area of a school run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
Also on Sunday, police said a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem carried out a car-ramming attack in central Israel, wounding four Israelis, two of them seriously. Israeli Border Police at the scene shot dead the attacker after he hit people waiting at two bus stops along a busy road. The Israeli military said four of its personnel were wounded, two of them seriously.
Israeli police chief Kobi Shabtai said such attacks were often “provoked” by events such as Saturday’s airstrike in Gaza.
