Hamas confirmed on Sunday that an Israeli airstrike in Gaza a day earlier killed Raed Saad, one of its senior commanders, as Israel continues violating the ceasefire by launching attacks in the Strip.
Saad was killed by a missile strike on a car in Gaza City, which killed three of his associates and wounded at least 25 others.
“In the wake of Israel’s continued violations, including the latest assassination of a Hamas commander just yesterday, we call on the mediators and especially the US administration and US President Donald Trump as the main guarantor of the agreement, to force the occupation [Israel] to respect the ceasefire deal and to implement it,” Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar, said in a statement on the attack.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid said in a post on X that Israel didn’t inform the US about its plans to target Saad. “Israel did not inform the Trump administration in advance about the assassination of Raad Saad. The Americans were only updated after the fact,” he wrote on X, citing a senior Israeli official.
According to Hamas, Saad worked as the commander of the group’s military manufacturing unit, and someone has been picked to replace him, though the new commander wasn’t named. According to a report from The New York Times last year, most of Hamas’s explosives are manufactured from unexploded Israeli bombs that are dropped on Gaza.
The IDF said in a statement that Saad was “one of the architects” of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel and accused him of “violating the ceasefire agreement” but didn’t specify how.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that at least five Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces over the previous 24-hour period, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed by the IDF in Gaza since the truce was supposed to go into effect to 391. The ministry said another 1,063 Palestinians have been wounded.
