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Israel Announces Elimination of a Prominent Hamas Leader
Israel announced on Wednesday the elimination of a senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, who is considered one of the main figures responsible for gathering intelligence for the movement.
The Israeli army stated that the operation targeted him in the western Gaza area, resulting in his elimination. It indicated that Mahmoud Al-Aswad was the head of Hamas’s General Security apparatus and represented an important figure and a key source of intelligence relied upon by the movement.
The army added that its forces continue operations around Gaza City and Khan Yunis aimed at identifying and dismantling terrorist sites, both above and below ground, while eliminating terrorist elements.
In related news, a joint investigation conducted by The Guardian (British), +972 Magazine (Israeli), and Local Call (Hebrew news website) revealed that the Israeli military intelligence database on Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters contained over 47,000 names as of May, including approximately 8,900 killed, according to official figures. However, this number appears to be much lower than the figures announced by Israeli political and military leaders, who mentioned numbers more than double, ranging between 17,000 and 20,000 killed during the same period.
Sources indicated that the announced figures were “deliberately inaccurate” to manipulate the outcomes of military assessments. The Guardian pointed out that the Israeli army relied on the death toll as a metric of its success, despite the lack of a long-term strategy for the war.
Amidst this discrepancy in numbers, a senior Western military source described the attempt to measure military progress by counting the bodies of militants, amid an unprecedented rise in civilian casualties, as “an ill-conceived and disappointing tactic,” reflecting differing perspectives on the true battlefield outcomes of the Gaza war.
