IDF says 3 soldiers killed in Gaza, as troops battle Hamas’s last northern battalion
Air Force general denies charges of ‘indiscriminate airstrikes’; troops locate, destroy 3 tunnel shafts used by Hamas connected to Gaza City hospital; ground op toll rises to 167
As Israel Defense Forces continued to battle the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip, the army on Thursday morning announced the deaths of three soldiers in fighting the previous day, bringing the military’s death toll in the ongoing ground operation in the Strip to 167.
They were named as:
- Sgt. First Class (res.) Asaf Pinhas Tubul, 22, of the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion, from Kiryat Motzkin.
- Cpt. (res.) Neriya Zisk, 24, a company commander in the 401st Armored Brigade’s 52nd Battalion, from Masu’ot Yitzhak.
- Maj. Dvir David Fima, 32, the deputy commander of the 460th Armored Brigade’s 198th Battalion, from Kfar Yona.
Tubul was killed in southern Gaza, in a battle that seriously wounded another officer and soldier of the 77th Battalion.
Fima was killed in central Gaza, in a battle that seriously wounded a soldier of the 7107th Battalion.
Zisk was also killed in central Gaza, in a separate battle.
The casualties were announced as the IDF’s 162nd Division continued to fight Hamas in the Gaza City neighborhoods of Daraj and Tuffah, where the army believes the terror group’s last standing battalion in northern Gaza is located.
The IDF said Thursday morning that troops of the Bislamach Brigade had destroyed Hamas infrastructure in a building from which RPGs were fired at a military vehicle, and the Nahal Brigade directed a fighter jet to strike a building where Hamas operatives were preparing to carry out an anti-tank guided missile attack.
לוחמי חטיבת ביסל״ח השמידו תשתית טרור בתוך בניין, ממנו שוגרו זמן קצר לפני כן טילי RPG לעבר כלי רכב של הלוחמים. כמו כן, לוחמי חטיבת הנח״ל הכווינו מטוס קרב של חיל האוויר לתקיפת מבנה בו נמצאו מחבלים במטרה לשגר נ״ט >> pic.twitter.com/q2twlnuG41
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) December 28, 2023
Troops of the 401st and 460th armored brigades killed several Hamas operatives in the Daraj-Tuffah battalion, including by calling in airstrikes, the IDF added.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry claimed a total of 50 people were killed in Israeli strikes Thursday, a figure that cannot be independently verified.
Responding to claims that Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza have been indiscriminate, a senior Israeli Air Force officer on Wednesday released a video statement detailing the careful procedures followed before hitting each target.
“Since the October 7 massacre, the Israeli Air Force has been conducting a precise, focused and process-based campaign,” said IAF Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Omer Tischler in the video statement.
“Our planning principles include: 1. Striking targets based on intel and military necessity for close air support. 2. Evacuation efforts: They enable us to strike and maneuver in areas with minimal civilian presence. 3. Selecting the right munitions to minimize collateral damage: This allows us to accurately strike Hamas even though it operates within civilian areas. 4. Real-time monitoring: During the strike, we are monitoring the target area. If it does not comply with our Standard Operating Procedures, we will abort,” he said.
War erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacres, in which some 3,000 terrorists stormed the border from Gaza, killing approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel, and kidnapping 240, mostly civilians, amid brutal atrocities.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at destroying Hamas, toppling it from power in Gaza and releasing the 133 hostages still held in Gaza.
The IAF senior officer addressed questions on massive craters seen in the Gaza Strip from Israeli strikes. “Heavy munitions are detonated underground, preventing fragmentation and significantly reducing the blastwave and debris as a result. In these strikes, the resulting crater visible in satellite images indicates that the underground detonation has actually occurred on a military target, and directly minimized damage to the surrounding areas,” he said.
The IDF also located and destroyed three tunnel shafts in the area of Gaza City’s Rantisi Children’s Hospital that connect to underground passages beneath the medical center used by the Hamas terror group.
In November, the IDF showed what it said was proof that the basement of Rantisi was used by Hamas to hide arms and possibly hold hostages kidnapped on October 7. It also revealed one of the tunnel shafts in the area at the time.
The IDF announced Wednesday that in recent weeks, the IDF’s 401st Brigade, Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit and elite Yahalom combat engineering unit had investigated and mapped out three tunnel shafts found in the area of Rantisi.
The IDF said the operations revealed that the three shafts, which were used by Hamas as a command center, were “connected by a wide underground network that runs under the hospital, several kilometers long, leading to strategic points in the heart of Gaza City.”
The IDF announces that it has located and destroyed three tunnel shafts in the area of Gaza City's Rantisi Children's Hospital which connect to underground passages beneath the medical center used by the Hamas terror group.
In November, the IDF showed what it said was proof that… pic.twitter.com/eDOlTCjeK1
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 27, 2023
One of the shafts, found in a high school adjacent to Rantisi, had an elevator heading down some 20 meters, according to the IDF. Another shaft, found in the home of a commander in Hamas’s naval forces, featured a blast door to prevent troops from entering, the IDF said.
After being investigated, the tunnel network was demolished by combat engineers.
Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the Gaza population was in “grave peril,” citing acute hunger and desperation throughout the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
The WHO said it delivered supplies to two hospitals on Tuesday, with only 15 out of 36 hospitals in the Strip said functioning with any capacity at all.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on the international community to take “urgent steps to alleviate the grave peril facing the population of Gaza and jeopardizing the ability of humanitarian workers to help people with terrible injuries, acute hunger, and at severe risk of disease.”
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says at least 21,110 people have been killed since October 7, including 8,800 children and 6,300 women, though these figures cannot be independently verified and are believed to comprise both combatants and civilians, including some killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.
The UN estimates that 1.9 million Gazans — out of a population of 2.4 million — have been displaced in the conflict.
The UN humanitarian office OCHA claimed Wednesday that the scale and intensity of ground operations and fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian terror groups in most areas of Gaza and their devastating impact was impeding aid deliveries.
“Operational challenges due to insecurity, blocked roads and a scarcity of fuel are also hampering the humanitarian response,” OCHA said in a statement, warning that telecommunications blackouts were making communications and internet service unreliable and also impacting humanitarian deliveries.
Despite these challenges, OCHA said that between December 23 and December 26 the UN World Food Program reached about half a million people internally displaced in UN shelters south of Wadi Gaza with food parcels, wheat flour, high-energy biscuits and nutrition supplements.
Israel has argued that the limited amount of aid entering Gaza has been the fault of UN facilitators, stressing that it has inspected three times the amount of aid than what has been entering Gaza.
In related news, Channel 12 news on Wednesday published a purportedly recent photograph of Muhammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, which was obtained by Israeli forces amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
The Ynet news site reported that the photo was from 2018. Its authenticity cannot be independently verified.
The release of the photo came after a report last week said videos apparently found by troops in Gaza showed Deif walking under his own power with what appear to be his own legs, albeit with a slight limp.
Little is known of Deif, but oft-repeated reports in Israel for over a decade have described him as missing both his legs and an arm, the result of an Israeli airstrike, one of at least five failed Israeli attempts on his life.
Agencies contributed to this report.
