The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed video and photos of a raid earlier this week on a Hamas terrorist base in the Jabaliya “refugee camp,” a neighborhood of multi-story buildings near Gaza City once settled by refugees from wars against Israel.
As the Times of Israel reported earlier this week, Israel took a “stronghold” within Jabaliya, killing some 50 terrorists in doing so.
The battle occurred at roughly the same time that Israel launched an airstrike on a Hamas commander elsewhere in Jabaliya, causing underground tunnels to collapse and leading critics worldwide to complain that Israel was targeting a “refugee camp.”
As Breitbart News explained in subsequent coverage, “Palestinian ‘refugee camps’ in the Middle East are dense multistory residential neighborhoods settled by Palestinian refugees after Arab states went to war against Israel in 1948 and 1967.” They are not tent cities of recently displaced people, as the term “refugee camp” implies, and are frequently used by Hamas for its operations, which deliberately places civilians in the surrounding area at risk, turning them into human shields for terror.
In this case, the stronghold in Jabaliya produced valuable intelligence. The IDF said in a statement on Friday via Telegram:
In recent days, soldiers from the Infantry, Combat Engineering and Armored Corps under the command of the Givati Brigade have taken control of a military stronghold belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization in northern Gaza.
After having taken control of the terror stronghold, IDF soldiers conducted extensive searches and located intelligence information that included operational orders belonging to Hamas. This also included operational maps, means of communication, command and control tables and personal details of Hamas commanders and terrorists.
Intelligence in the 162nd Division and additional sources are investigating the materials which will be used by the IDF in future fights.
The IDF released photos of some of the materials it found:
Reporters in the White House briefing room asked White House national security aide John Kirby on Thursday whether the Jabaliya refugee camp was a “legitimate target” and raised the prospect that Israel could be accused of “war crimes.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.