The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Friday that large numbers of Palestinian terrorists were surrendering to Israeli soldiers after battles in Gaza, and that detainees were being interrogated to provide intelligence to the Israeli military.
IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in his evening briefing to the media (translation via IDF):
We are eliminating many terrorists, and increasingly are seeing terrorists who surrender during battle and turn themselves over to our forces. In the last 48 hours, we apprehended more than two hundred suspects, dozens of whom were transferred to the 504 Unit of the Intelligence Corps and to the ISA for investigation in Israel. Amongst the suspects transferred for investigation are Hamas commanders and Nukhba [the unit responsible for the October 7 attack] terrorists. Their investigation assists the continued operations of the forces in the field.
Hagari confirmed that Israel had attempted a military operation to rescue hostages, and that two IDF soldiers had been wounded. He suggested that while the raid had successfully entered a Hamas hideout and killed some number of terrorists, hostages had not been found or had been moved away.
As Breitbart News has noted, anti-Israel activists accuse Israel of rounding up civilians, and of humiliating them by forcing them to strip to their underwear during the process of their arrest. But Hamas terrorists often wear civilian clothing, making it hard to distinguish combatant and non-combatant; and stripping the terrorists is a precaution against suicide vests under clothing.
Israel also announced that it had discovered a Hamas terror tunnel inside a school classroom, which led to a nearby mosque:
In a statement, the IDF said: “This is another example of Hamas’s cynical abuse of schools, they have turned places that should be safe-havens for children into hideouts for terrorists.”
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.