# Israeli Strike on Al-Mawasi Camp Kills Gaza Police Chief and Others
*Event date: 2025-01-02*
By IO Digest Desk
An Israeli air strike on a tent camp for displaced families in the al-Mawasi humanitarian zone of southern Gaza killed the chief of Gaza's police force, his deputy and other Palestinians, according to local authorities cited by the BBC. The deaths came amid a wider wave of strikes across the territory that the Hamas-run Civil Defence service said killed more than 40 people in 15 separate attacks.
The overnight strike in al-Mawasi killed police chief Mahmoud Salah and deputy chief Hussam Shahwan along with nine other people, the report said. The Hamas-run interior ministry condemned what it called their assassination and said the two men had been performing humanitarian and national duties. Israel's military confirmed it had carried out a strike targeting Shahwan, but described him as a terrorist who had helped Hamas's military wing plan attacks on Israeli forces.
That clash in descriptions defined the immediate political significance of the strike. Palestinian authorities portrayed the dead officers as members of a civilian protection force, while the Israel Defense Forces said the police structure was tied to Hamas governance and accused it of violence against Gazans as well as coordination with the armed wing. The BBC report did not indicate any independent resolution of those competing claims on the event date.
The human impact at the camp, however, was not in dispute. Three brothers aged seven, 11 and 13 were among those killed, according to the report. Their father said shrapnel struck the boys while they slept in the family tent. A nearby resident told Reuters she heard an Apache helicopter overhead before a powerful explosion that sent shrapnel as far as 100 meters. Those accounts illustrated the vulnerability of displaced families living in shelters inside an area the Israeli military had designated a humanitarian zone.
The IDF said it had taken numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians before the al-Mawasi strike. But the location of the attack drew fresh attention because Israel has repeatedly urged civilians to move into that coastal zone while also accusing Hamas operatives of hiding among displaced people there. That contradiction has repeatedly intensified scrutiny of how military targets are selected in one of the most densely displaced environments in the war.
Later on the same day, medics said another six people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Gaza interior ministry headquarters in Khan Younis. The IDF said it had targeted Hamas operatives working from a command-and-control center embedded inside the municipality building. Additional deadly strikes were reported elsewhere in Gaza, including Jabalia, Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, according to the BBC summary.
The report also noted worsening humanitarian conditions from cold and wet weather. More than 1,500 tents had been flooded by rainwater and sewage since Tuesday, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency. For displaced families, that meant the danger came not only from air strikes but also from deteriorating shelter conditions in winter.
On the event date, the al-Mawasi strike stood out because it combined a politically sensitive target, a humanitarian-zone location and civilian deaths that quickly became emblematic of Gaza's wider wartime reality. The available evidence established the basic sequence clearly: Israel struck the camp, senior Gaza police officials were killed, civilians including children died alongside them, and both sides advanced sharply different explanations of who had been targeted and why.
