IDF says terrorists near defeat in Rafah, fighting now limited to one neighborhood
Military says some 60 terror targets across Gaza hit in past day; Hamas authorities report over 20 killed and dozens more wounded
The Israeli military said Saturday that it was close to defeating all remaining Palestinian terror operatives in southern Gaza’s Rafah, with fighting now only taking place in the Janina neighborhood.
Troops of the Golani Brigade have been operating in Janina in recent days. The Israel Defense Forces said the soldiers had destroyed terror infrastructures, located dozens of tunnel shafts and killed dozens of operatives.
“Janina is the last area where fighting against terrorists in the Rafah Brigade is taking place,” the military said.
Four IDF soldiers have been killed and several others have been wounded during fighting in the Janina area in the past week.
Meanwhile, the military said that over the past day, the Israeli Air Force had struck some 60 terror targets across the Gaza Strip. Hamas authorities reported 23 killed and dozens more wounded in the previous 24 hours.
In the Strip’s north, the IDF said troops of the 252nd Division killed two gunmen who approached forces; in the Morag Corridor area, the 36th Division struck a booby-trapped building where several operatives were located; and in Rafah, Gaza Division forces destroyed Hamas infrastructure both above and below ground.
Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defense agency said that five people were killed in an Israeli strike on a tent in Gaza City — all members of a single family, according to relatives. The figures could not be verified and did not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
“Three children, their mother and her husband were sleeping inside a tent and were bombed by an [Israeli] occupation aircraft,” family member Omar Abu al-Kass told AFP. The strikes came “without warning and without [them] having done anything wrong,” Abu al-Kass alleged, saying he was the children’s maternal grandfather.
Images from the scene showed mourners, some of them weeping, gathering alongside five white shrouds of different sizes.
The Israeli army, which resumed its offensive in Gaza on March 18 after a two-month truce, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the strike. 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 homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
On Saturday morning, the army said that nine IDF soldiers, including two senior officers, were lightly wounded by an explosive device in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood overnight.
The troops of the Jerusalem Brigade were carrying out scans in Shejaiya when the blast went off. Among the wounded were the commander of the Jerusalem Brigade’s 6310th Battalion and the deputy commander of the 252nd Division. All were taken to a hospital in good condition, the army said.
Sources close to Hamas said Friday that a delegation from the terror group held two meetings with Egyptian and Qatari mediators in Doha this week, but they produced no breakthrough in the search for a Gaza truce.
The developments come as Israel and the US look to resume aid deliveries to Gaza while preventing food, medicine and other basic items from being hoarded by Hamas, as they say the terror group has repeatedly done with past supplies.
Israel stopped allowing aid into Gaza on March 2 after the first phase of a ceasefire and hostage release deal concluded.
For weeks, UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations have warned of dwindling supplies of everything from fuel and medicine to food and clean water in the coastal territory that is home to 2.4 million Palestinians.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that US President Donald Trump expressed frustration with his promised tasks of ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in a meeting with top donors in Florida last week.
Citing people who were in the room, the report said that Trump had said finding a solution in Gaza was difficult because “they’d been fighting for a thousand years.”
The Times of Israel Community.