The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pressed ahead Tuesday in attacks on the two main Hamas strongholds in Gaza City to the north and Khan Yunis to the south, encountering some of the heaviest fighting of the war thus far.
In a briefing, IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said:
We are on the sixtieth day of the war. IDF soldiers are currently fighting in Khan Yunis, the Hamas stronghold in the southern Gaza Strip. The military wing of Hamas consists of two dominant regional brigades that serve as the strongholds for the terrorist organization. These are the Gaza City Brigade and the Khan Yunis Brigade. Our forces are advancing in dismantling Hamas’ military capabilities. The four battalions of the Khan Yunis Brigade have established terrorist infrastructure both above and below ground throughout the area. The terrorists from Khan Yunis played a significant role in the terrorist attack on October 7th, where they infiltrated Israeli territory, committed a massacre, and returned to the heart of Khan Yunis. We are determined to eliminate the terrorists and damage their infrastructure as we did in the Northern Gaza Strip.
In parallel to the fighting in southern Gaza, the battle continues in the north. Our forces are engaged in the strongholds in the heart of Jabalia and Shuja’iyya. In each of these strongholds, integrated attacks from land and air are being carried out, and underground infrastructures are being destroyed. Many terrorists are being killed in face-to-face combat, and weaponry is being located. It’s important to understand that we also release our own videos from the field. When our forces move within the area and clear the space, we encounter and kill terrorists. This is how we operate in clearing the area, and this will also be done in Jabalia, Shuja’iyya, and Khan Yunis.
Overall, since the beginning of the war, we have attacked over 20,000 targets across the Gaza Strip. Today, we will release special footage from a Hamas tunnel of the senior members of the Northern Brigade prior to the war. Most of those present in this photo have been eliminated, from the head of the brigade, Rendor, to other senior figures in the photo. This documentation demonstrates Hamas’s use of terrorist infrastructures beneath civilian infrastructures, and additionally proves the IDF’s effective strikes against the organization’s senior figures in the northern Gaza Strip. This is documentation that we bring from the field, along with additional materials that we are collecting, revealing how Hamas built its operational system within the civilian medium, using civilians as human shields. We reached and killed these senior figures in their underground facilities.
The photo and video Hagari referenced were released on social media:
Israel and Lebanon continued trading blows in the north. According to social media, a Lebanese soldier died when Israel responded to Hezbollah fire, marking the first official Lebanese military casualty of the war.
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.
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