IDF infantryman killed in southern Gaza, bringing ground op toll to 316
Sgt. Eyal Shynes, 19, killed in Hamas sniper attack in Rafah; army says it struck terrorists hiding in schools, humanitarian zone
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
An Israeli soldier was killed fighting in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday morning, the military announced Friday.
The slain soldier was named by the Israel Defense Forces as Sgt. Eyal Shynes, 19, from Kibbutz Afik.
Shynes served with the Nahal Infantry Brigade’s 931st Battalion, which has been operating in southern Gaza’s Rafah. He was killed in a sniper attack claimed by Hamas.
Shynes’s death brought the toll of slain troops in the ground offensive against Hamas and operations along the Gaza border to 316.
The IDF has been operating in Rafah, one of the last remaining Hamas strongholds, since early May.
The commander of one of the infantry brigades taking part in the Rafah operation told The Times of Israel and other reporters last week that the army expects to wrap up that operation within a month.
The IDF is still expected to continue conducting raids and other operations throughout Gaza aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to maintain overall security control of the Strip.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said Monday, “We are clearly approaching the point where we [can] say we have dismantled the Rafah Brigade. It is defeated not in the sense that there are no more terrorists in it, but in the sense that it can no longer function as a fighting framework.”
And the head of the Israeli Air Force, Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, said Thursday that “Hamas in Gaza will be defeated soon.”
Israeli officials have said that the army has defeated all but four Hamas battalions in the Gaza Strip, including two in the southern city of Rafah, and two more in central Gaza. Several of the group’s top leaders, including Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar and armed wing head Mohammed Deif, nonetheless remain at large.
Fighting was also continuing in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood after the military launched a new pinpoint operation there on Thursday.
On Friday, the military said the raid, which was being carried out by the 98th Division, came following intelligence information on Hamas operatives and infrastructure in the area.
The IDF said the division’s 7th Armored Brigade pushed into the Shejaiya area during the day, and overnight, the Paratroopers Brigade began to raid sites in the neighborhood.
Dozens of Hamas sites were struck from the air as the ground forces pushed in, the military said Friday.
In separate “significant” strikes in northern Gaza, the IDF said it killed dozens of terror operatives who were holed up in a school and other UNRWA facilities.
Meanwhile, overnight, the military said a fighter jet struck a Hamas operative in a building in central Gaza’s Deir al Balah, within the Israeli-designated “humanitarian zone.”
“The terrorist operated from within the humanitarian area, which the organization uses as a shield for terrorist activity,” the IDF said.
The military said that ahead of the strike, it worked to evacuate the civilian population from the area of the building. It also said it used aerial surveillance, a precision munition, and other means to mitigate harm to Palestinian civilians.
War in Gaza erupted on October 7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel’s South in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 37,500 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 and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
