The IDF's operation to assassinate Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar failed, and he is still fighting against Israeli forces, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told the Islamic Republic-affiliated news source Tehran Times in a Monday report.
“This is a false claim Israel makes to justify the bombing of a hospital. Our brothers in Gaza have assured us that Mohammad Sinwar is alive and still fighting the enemy firmly,” the source quoted Hamdan as saying.
The report comes a day after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that there are rising indications that Mohammed Sinwar was killed.
Around the same time as Katz's statement, IDF sources told The Jerusalem Post that it didn't recognize foreign reports stating that Sinwar’s body had been found with around a dozen of his aides, including Rafah Brigade commander Mohammed Shabana.
Sinwar was located because Israel gathered intelligence that he was planning a meeting of Hamas's military wing's leadership beneath Khan Yunis’s European Hospital, according to Walla.
Reports of the first attempts to kill Sinwar were first revealed on Tuesday last week.
Seven months since the killing of Yahya Sinwar
When Mohammed Sinwar was born in 1975 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, his brother Yahya was already 13.
The older Sinwar brother was killed in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip in October of last year, in an unplanned operation.
Evidence that he was dead included matching both his dental and fingerprint records, which Israel had obtained from the period when he was in Israeli prisons until 2011.
The IDF's 162nd Division, including the 828 Bislamach Brigade, a tank from Battalion 195, and infantry from Battalion 450, killed and identified Sinwar.
Yonah Jeremy Bob, Amichai Stein, and Amir Bohbot contributed to this report