The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed the mayor of the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in a strike in central Gaza on Monday, the IDF and Hamas both said.
Hamas called it “a cowardly assassination of the mayor of Al-Maghazi, Mr. Hatem Saleh Al-Ghamri,” saying Israeli “warplanes directly and without warning bombed the building of the Joint Services Council of the central governorate’s municipalities.”
Hamas said the strike was “a war crime contrary to international laws that grant immunity and protection to civilian figures.”
The IDF said its fighter jet struck and “eliminated the terrorist,” characterizing Al-Ghamri as a “Hamas military wing operative in the field of projectile launches within the Maghazi Battalion of the Central Camps.”
Some background: The Al-Maghazi refugee camp is located in the central part of the coastal enclave south of Wadi Gaza, the waterway that divides north from south Gaza.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the camp is filled with narrow alleys, where 33,000 people lived before the conflict, in a relatively densely packed area no more than 0.6 square kilometers (about 0.2 square miles).
CNN's Mohammed Tawfeeq and Kathleen Magramo contributed reporting to this post.