Israeli strike on south Gaza hospital kills senior Hamas official
Interior view of destroyed Nasser Hospital following the Israeli attack in Khan Yunis, Gaza/Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — A senior Hamas official was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in southern Gaza on Sunday, the terror group and the Israel Defense Forces said, as Israel expanded its renewed campaign into the Palestinian territory.
Ismail Barhoum, a senior member of Hamas’ political bureau, was killed in the strike on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Hamas confirmed, describing the attack as a “cowardly” assassination. Hamas said Barhoum was receiving medical treatment in the hospital when he was killed.
The IDF and Israeli Security Agency said in a joint statement that the attack targeted a “key terrorist in the Hamas terrorist organization” who was “operating inside” the hospital, which is the largest in southern Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said the Israeli strike targeted the hospital’s surgical wing and occurred when “many patients and wounded” were inside the hospital. Videos from the scene showed a fire inside the building following the strike.
The ministry said that “many others” — including medical personnel — were wounded in the strike, “with varying degrees of injuries.” The attack, it added, “also caused panic and forced the complete evacuation of the department after a large portion of it was destroyed.”
Nasser Hospital has been shelled several times by Israeli forces since war broke out in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, following Hamas’ surprise attack into southern Israel.
IDF forces raided the hospital in February 2024, when the IDF said it had intelligence that hostages taken during the Oct. 7 attack had been held there. Israel has repeatedly alleged that Hamas was using the facility as a “command-and-control center.” Hamas has denied using Nasser and other Gaza hospitals for military purposes.
Israel resumed its air and ground campaign in Gaza last week, ending the ceasefire agreed with Hamas in January.
At least 673 people have since been killed and 1,233 injured by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire ended, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The total death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, is now at 50,021, according to the ministry.
ABC News’ Diaa Ostaz, Will Gretsky and Victoria Beaule contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Israeli strikes killed at least 86 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip since the announcement of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday, Gaza’s Civil Defence body in the Hamas-run territory said.
More than 250 other people were injured in Israeli attacks, they added.
The strikes came despite the ceasefire agreement announced on Wednesday after weeks of intense negotiations in Doha, Qatar. The final round of talks followed more than a year of failed efforts to reach an accord.
The first of three ceasefire phases is set to go into force on Sunday, though is still pending approval by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. If the first is successful, the second phase will begin after 42 days, according to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who announced the deal in Doha.
On Thursday, Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of trying to renege on parts of the deal, an allegation Hamas denied, saying in a statement that “The organization is committed to the ceasefire agreement announced by the mediators.”
Mediators hope the nascent ceasefire will form a roadmap to end more than 15 months of conflict in Gaza, which has devastated the Palestinian territory and created a vast humanitarian crisis.
Gaza Health Ministry officials said Thursday that at least 46,788 Palestinians had been killed and 110,453 injured in the strip since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a terrorist attack on southern Israel.
Some 1,200 people in Israel were killed in the attack, with 253 more taken hostage by militants, according to Israeli officials. Following several rounds of hostage releases, Israeli officials say 94 abductees remain in Gaza, including 34 who have been confirmed dead. Four more hostages abducted in 2014 are still being held in Gaza by Hamas, two of whom are believed to be alive.
More than 400 Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed during the fighting inside Gaza, nine of whom were killed in the past week, the IDF said.
The Israel Defense Forces claims to have killed more than 15,000 Hamas fighters and other militants throughout the course of the war. Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif were among those killed since October 2023.
ABC News’ Samy Zyara, Diaa Ostaz, Nasser Atta, Meredith Deliso, Somayeh Malekian and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(BOSTON) — A doctor who was arriving in the United States to teach medicine was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport on March 13, according to legal documents obtained by ABC News.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh had a valid H1B visa, or work visa, that had been issued on March 11. A Lebanese citizen, she was employed by Brown University as an assistant professor of medicine.
A kidney transplant specialist, Alawieh had also previously trained at both the University of Washington and Yale University.
The legal filing claimed that Brown’s Division of Nephrology was “extremely distressed.”
“She is an assistant professor and has serious responsibilities,” the document attested. “Her colleagues have been covering for her, but that is no solution. Dr. Alawieh is an outstanding academic in Transplant Nephrology, and she is needed at Brown Medicine.”
Also according to the legal documents, DHS officials gave no reason for her detention.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to ABC News’ questions regarding her whereabouts and did not disclose why she was denied entry into the U.S.
However, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s Assistant Commissioner of Public Affairs, shared a statement saying, “Arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States. Our CBP Officers adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats, using rigorous screening, vetting, strong law enforcement partnerships, and keen inspectional skills to keep threats out of the country. CBP is committed to protecting the United States from national security threats.”
A U.S. district court judge in Massachusetts ordered that Alawieh should not be deported without 48 hours’ notice and a reason why from DHS.
Instead, according to a notice of apparent violation, DHS “willfully” disregarded the court order and deported Alawieh to France, with a scheduled flight to continue on to Lebanon. It is unconfirmed if that deportation took place as planned.
Soldiers from 1st Battalion 4th Infantry Skynet team walking through the area of operations during Combined Resolve 25-1at Hohenfels Training Area on Feb. 5, 2025. (U.S. Army Reserve Photo by Spc. Airam B. I Amaro-Millan)
(WASHINGTON) — Nearly three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. troops in Eastern Europe are using the lessons learned on the battlefields in Ukraine to modernize the Army’s tactics and use of new technologies or what the U.S. Army calls Transformation in Contact.
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, thousands of U.S. military forces were sent to Eastern Europe to reassure NATO countries in the region and to deter Russia from expanding the conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders.
What started as a short-duration deployment has now grown to a current level of 23,000 U.S. Army troops maintained by a constant rotation of units on nine-month deployments.
“I have responsibility for (U.S. Army) forces from Estonia, U.S. forces that are stationed in Estonia all the way down to Bulgaria, 23 different foreign operating sites to assure our NATO partners and allies, but more importantly, to deter future Russian aggression.,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Corps, told ABC News in an interview. “It’s just a critical time to be here right now.”
The deployment of those U.S. Army forces so close to Ukraine also means that they are able to apply what they are seeing on the country’s battlefields and how to apply it to their own operations.
“There’s not a better place to learn from the conflict in Ukraine than Eastern Europe,” said Costanza. “Our NATO partners are helping with training and equipping the Ukrainians. So we got a direct inject of all those lessons learned that are coming out of Ukraine.”
Those lessons learned include the revolutionary use of small commercially available drones to drop bombs on Russian targets, the development of long-range one-way attack drones, and techniques to evade electronic warfare detection that can be used to target forces on the frontlines by tracking radios and other communications gear.
“The speed of innovation on the SUAS and the counter-SUAS capability is incredible,” said Costanza, using the military acronym for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems used to describe small drones.
“The Ukrainians will develop a new capability for those SUAS, the very next day, the Russians will figure out how to counter that which causes the Ukrainians to have to innovate and adapt very quickly and figure out something else,” he said.
In early February, U.S. Army forces trained for two weeks with other NATO countries in Germany in Combined Resolve, an exercise that is part of the Army’s Transformation in Combat, which uses some of the Army’s new gear and allows soldiers to innovate just like what is happening in Ukraine.
“When they’re in Combined Resolve fighting the opposing force, they’re going to figure out how to make stuff work and innovate while they’re in contact,” said Costanza. “I think the Transformation in Contact effort is just going to speed up how we equip our soldiers now quickly, and how we organize maybe a bit differently.”
For example, soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, a unit permanently stationed in Germany, used 3-D printers to make sensors provided to soldiers that Costanza said could detect drones.
They also used a novel way of communicating by using commercially available technology provided to them to facilitate their radio communications with the Polish forces they were training with who did not speak English.
“To the point where you can pick up a radio and talk to somebody in a Polish unit, and it actually translates what you say into Polish so when it comes out on the Polish radio, the Polish soldier hears it, understands it, and to respond back, and you hear his response in English,” said Costanza.
He praised the ingenuity of young soldiers who “figure out how to make all this work, and bang, you have something that bridges a gap.”
Transformation in Contact is also changing how the Army arranges itself on the battlefield as the U.S. Army shifts away from the large field headquarters seen in Iraq and Afghanistan towards smaller dispersed units that can do the same thing.
The war in Ukraine has shown that large headquarters can be destroyed with missiles because the high levels of electronic signals they emit can be detected by electronic warfare tools.
“Now it’s individual vehicles that are spread out all over the battlefield, much from the electromagnetics spectrum standpoint, the signature is so much smaller, and it’s just harder to figure out what’s a command post and what might just be an individual vehicle,” said Costanza.
“They can actually work distributed like that to have that same common operational picture of what’s going on and to be able to synchronize everything they need to do to win the fight, but without physically being together,” he added.
Also used in the exercise was the Army’s new lightweight all-terrain vehicle, the Infantry Squad Vehicle which can transport as many as nine soldiers on the battlefield.
“You get nine guys on there and all their kit and you can quickly move now and reposition forces in a way that infantry brigades haven’t been able to do in the past. And so it just gives you a lot more capability,” said Costanza.
As the rotation of U.S. Army units in Eastern Europe continues, some of them will have already gone through previous versions of Transformation in Contact exercises carried out in the United States.
Costanza said those units will bring their lessons learned from those exercises and will also innovate with new concepts much as the units they are replacing have been doing during their deployment.
“So, we’re just going to keep learning as we keep fielding this stuff out, and just continuing to get better on how we organize ourselves and how we equip ourselves,” said Costanza.
