2 soldiers killed in north Gaza fighting; 50 said killed as IDF strikes terror targets

The Israel Defense Forces announced the deaths of two soldiers during fighting in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, as the IDF pressed ahead with its renewed offensive against Hamas in the Jabaliya area.

Meanwhile, reports by local hospital officials, Associated Press journalists and the Palestinian Authority news agency said more than 50 people had been killed in several Israeli airstrikes over the past day.

The IDF said its strikes targeted terror sites in the Strip, and that it took measures to warn uninvolved parties to vacate the area. It said troops had killed dozens of gunmen in close-quarters combat.

The slain troops were named as Staff Sgt. Ofir Berkovich, 20, from Modi’in, and Sgt. Elishai Young, 19, from Dimona.

Both served with the 401st Armored Brigade’s 52nd Battalion.

Their deaths bring Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip to 357. The number includes a police officer killed in a hostage rescue mission and a Defense Ministry contractor.

In northern Gaza, Israel was said to be increasing the flow of supplies to the Strip’s much-battered north while the military pressed on with a renewed offensive there.

Strikes were reported at a number of hospitals and inactive schools sheltering displaced people. Israel says terror operatives regularly use such facilities as operating bases, and that it makes an effort to avoid harm to innocents.

Marwan Sultan, director of the Indonesian hospital, said Israeli tanks had surrounded the hospital, cut off its electricity and shelled its second and third floors, causing risk to staff and patients.

At Al-Awda Hospital, strikes hit the building’s top floors, injuring several staff members, the hospital said in a statement.

According to WAFA, the official PA news agency, at least seven people were killed and several were injured in the strike on the school in Shati in the Strip’s north.

The IDF said that hundreds of civilians had evacuated from Jabaliya in recent days, and that troops had ensured their safe passage.

“During the activity, the IDF allowed civilians to evacuate safely from the area, through organized routes. So far, hundreds of people have evacuated,” Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on X.

He said that the army and COGAT were in contact with the international community and health authorities in Gaza to “maintain the ongoing functioning of the emergency systems of the hospitals, through the transfer of medical equipment and the supply of fuel subject to the operational situation, along with the evacuation of staff [and] patients.”

Adraee also said troops had detained several terror operatives in the area.

The military said that troops with the 162nd Division had killed dozens of Hamas operatives and seized many weapons over the last day during the ongoing operation in Jabaliya.

#عاجل حاجز الخوف من السنوار ينكسر: بعد ممارسة ضغوطات مستمرة – بدء مغادرة مئات المدنيين من جباليا

⭕️في إطار عملية مشتركة لجيش الدفاع وجهاز الأمن العام (الشاباك) الليلة الماضية وبعد ان عملت قوات الفرقة 162 ضد المخربين والبنى الإرهابية في منطقة جباليا بدأ مئات المدنيين باخلاء… pic.twitter.com/l2h3UfYdse

— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) October 19, 2024

In central Gaza, at least 10 people were killed, including two children, when a house was hit in the town of Zawayda, according to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where the casualties were taken.

Another strike killed 11 people, all from the same family, in the Maghazi refugee camp, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where they were taken.

AP journalists counted the bodies taken to the Al-Aqsa Hospital from the two strikes.

Overnight between Thursday and Friday, the strikes on Jabaliya killed at least 30 people, Palestinians said. Fares Abu Hamza, head of the Hamas-run health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service, said more than half of them were women and children.

The IDF said its forces, which have been operating in Jabaliya for the past two weeks, killed dozens of gunmen on Thursday, carried out aerial strikes and dismantled military infrastructure.

The IDF said it carries out “many measures before its actions in order to avoid harming uninvolved” people and that each of its strikes “is based on intelligence indications of terror infrastructure or the presence of terrorists.”

The army accuses Hamas of using civilians in Gaza as human shields and has published evidence to that effect from hospitals, schools, kindergartens and other civilian sites.

Israel launched a new offensive in northern Gaza earlier this month targeting Hamas fighters, who it said were regrouping there.

Residents said Israeli forces had effectively isolated the far northern Gazan towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya from Gaza City, blocking movement except for those families heeding evacuation orders and leaving the three towns.

Israel urged all civilians to evacuate northern Gaza at the start of the war, but some have refused to leave.

Residents said communications and internet services had been cut, disrupting rescue operations. Hamas health officials say aid had not been reaching the worst affected areas in northern Gaza, including the three isolated towns.

In Jabaliya, residents said Israeli tanks had reached the heart of the camp after pushing through suburbs and residential districts. They said the army was destroying dozens of houses daily, from the air and the ground, and by placing bombs in buildings, then detonating them remotely.

At the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, medics said they had to replace children in intensive care with more critical cases of adults badly wounded by the strike on the school in Jabaliya, where Israel said gunmen had embedded themselves.

Kamal Adwan’s director, Hussam Abu Safiya, said in a video statement that the children had been moved to another division inside the facility, where they were being cared for. He said medical staff were exhausted and that hospital supplies, including food, were badly depleted.

Israel said it sent about 30 truckloads of aid into northern Gaza on Friday, including food, water, medical supplies, and shelter equipment. “We’re fighting Hamas, we’re not fighting the people of Gaza,” military spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told journalists in an online briefing.

The US threatened Israel this week that it could withhold arms shipments to Israel if the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza were not alleviated.

Following the threat, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the number of aid trucks entering Gaza be increased to 250 a day, according to Kan news.

The broadcaster also reported that at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, ministers were expected to deliberate whether to enlist a private security contractor to distribute humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

Israel has accused Hamas of hijacking aid trucks, taking supplies for itself or selling them at exorbitant rates.

According to the United Nations, some 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily before the war, which was sparked by Hamas’s onslaught on October 7, 2023.

The shock assault saw thousands of terrorists storm southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Strip’s Hamas-run health ministry. The toll, which cannot be verified, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 fighters in battle as of August, as well as about 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the onslaught.