IDF announces Sgt. Omer Ginzburg killed in combat in Gaza’s Khan Younis
Paratrooper shot by sniper in southern Gaza city, where military ordered evacuations and launched operation due to Hamas activity
The Israel Defense Forces announced Monday that an Israeli soldier was killed during fighting in the southern Gaza Strip the previous day.
The soldier was named as Sgt. Omer Ginzburg, 19, of the Paratroopers Brigade’s 101st Battalion, from Kiryat Tivon.
Ginzburg was killed in a Hamas-claimed sniper attack in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza city where the IDF launched an operation in recent days after ordering civilians to evacuate some areas.
His death brought Israel’s death toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip to 332.
The army said Sunday it had “precise intelligence” indicating that the Hamas terror group was operating out of the designated humanitarian zone in the southern Gaza Strip, which includes parts of Khan Younis, and further adjusted the zone’s boundaries, instructing anyone outside the boundaries to move.
A strike was later directed against a site used to launch rockets from Khan Younis, and another was carried out against a building used by Hamas’s rocket unit.
“Due to many acts of terrorism, the exploitation of the humanitarian zone for terrorist activity, and the firing of rockets at the State of Israel from the al-Jalaa neighborhood, remaining in this area has become dangerous,” the IDF said.
The instructions were transmitted via leaflets dropped from aircraft, SMS messages, phone calls and media broadcasts, with the military saying that the early warning was aimed at mitigating harm to civilians.
Last week, the IDF issued an evacuation covering districts in the center, east, and west of Khan Younis, making it one of the largest such orders in the 10-month-old war between Israel and Hamas.
Hospitals in the affected zones did not need to evacuate, a military source said, adding that IDF had communicated this to Palestinian health officials and officials in the international community.
Families began leaving the area almost immediately after the call to evacuate, fearing fresh missile strikes and fighting, AFP journalists reported.
Palestinian media outlets shared footage of civilians leaving the affected area at night, flashlights in hand in order to see the path.
تغطية صحفية: نزوح العائلات من بعض المناطق الشرقية في مدينة خانيونس بعد تهديدات الاحتلال وقصفه لها pic.twitter.com/30nmkHIZiM
— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) August 10, 2024
Further south, the IDF said on Sunday that it had struck a cell of terror operatives that were identified emerging from a tunnel shaft in Rafah.
The operatives were spotted by soldiers monitoring surveillance cameras, the IDF said, and they were struck and killed by a drone a short while later.
Also in Rafah, the military said that troops directed an airstrike on a building where a cell of operatives had been spotted.
The war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, which saw terrorists murder some 1,200 people and seize 251 hostages. It is believed that 111 of the hostages abducted on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF.
In response, Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza with the proclaimed objectives of dismantling Hamas and getting the hostages back.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle as of May and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including schools and mosques.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
