Israeli forces push deeper into central and southern Gaza amid airstrikes
Palestinian residents report heavy air, artillery fire; IDF says it killed dozens of terror operatives, raided Hamas intel HQ in Khan Younis; Ground op death toll rises to 170
Israeli tanks pushed deeper into districts in central and southern Gaza Friday overnight and Saturday under heavy air and artillery fire, pressing forward with the ground campaign in Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists.
Fighting late on Friday and early Saturday was focused in al-Bureij, Nuseirat, and Maghazi in central Gaza, and Khan Younis in the southern part of the Strip, backed by intensive air strikes.
A Hamas health official alleged the strikes had killed 100 Palestinians and injured 150 in the central Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours. The terror group does not differentiate in its reports between civilians and combatants.
The Israel Defense Forces on Saturday announced the death of a soldier killed during fighting in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, and another who succumbed to his wounds from earlier fighting, bringing the toll of slain troops since the start of the ground offensive in late October against Hamas to 170.
They are: Master Sgt. (res.) Constantine Sushko, 30, of the Combat Engineering Corps’ 7086th Battalion, from Tel Aviv, and Cpt. Harel Ittah, 22, a team commander in the Givati Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, from Netanya.
Sushko was killed in central Gaza over the weekend, during a battle that seriously wounded another reservist.
Ittah was seriously wounded on December 22 in southern Gaza, and succumbed to his wounds over the weekend, the IDF said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the biggest and most important medical facility in the south of the territory, Red Crescent images posted online showed ambulances operating amid smashed streets, carrying injured children.
The IDF said troops of the 7th Armored Brigade had advanced further in southern Gaza, while raiding Hamas sites in Khan Younis, including the headquarters of the terror group’s intelligence division in the city.
The intelligence headquarters was responsible for all of Hamas’s intelligence activity in the Khan Younis area, the IDF said, adding that it also located a command center belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group in the same complex.
According to the IDF, the troops recovered “very valuable” intelligence materials from the sites.
In central Gaza’s al-Bureij camp, the IDF detailed the operations of the 188th Armored Brigade, including an incident in which troops battled Hamas gunmen hiding in a school that was being used as a shelter for Palestinian civilians.
On Thursday, the 188th Brigade received intelligence of dozens of Hamas operatives hiding in a school where civilians were sheltering.
The IDF details the operations of the 188th Armored Brigade in central Gaza’s al-Bureij camp, including an incident in which troops battled Hamas gunmen hiding in a school being used as a shelter for Palestinian civilians.
On Thursday, the 188th Brigade received intelligence of… pic.twitter.com/n7vw4GfDjG
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“The terrorists took advantage of the presence of civilians in the school area in order to fire RPGs and small arms at the forces, while hiding behind women and children,” the IDF said, adding that the troops raided the school, capturing the operatives who were holed up inside and killing others near the complex.
In other operations in al-Bureij, the IDF says the 188th Brigade has encountered many more Hamas gunmen who attacked forces from civilian sites.
The brigade has also located and destroyed three rocket launchers and nine tunnel shafts, the IDF said.
Meanwhile, troops of the Givati Brigade raided several more Hamas sites in southern Gaza, killing operatives in the process with sniper fire and tank shelling, the IDF said.
It said that the Givati troops also directed several airstrikes on Hamas gunmen in the area, along with other infrastructure belonging to the terror group.
Before the troops maneuvered deeper into Khan Younis, the IDF said the 98th Division and Air Force carried out some 50 strikes on targets in the area, including tunnels and other infrastructure used by Hamas to attack troops.
Palestinians reported fierce Israeli tank fire and aerial bombing in Khan Younis in southern Gaza overnight. Planes also carried out a series of air strikes on the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, according to medics and Palestinian journalists.
Intensive battles
Israeli forces have been pounding Khan Younis in preparation for an anticipated further advance into the main southern city, swaths of which they captured in early December.
Earlier, the IDF said that troops killed dozens of terrorists on Friday in a series of strikes and battles across the Strip.
Multiple battles occurred in Gaza City, where troops from the 14th Reserve Armored Brigade eliminated dozens of terrorists with air force support, the IDF said on Saturday morning. Forces on the ground helped to direct air force strikes as navy vessels provided additional firepower from the sea, it said.
The update came amid reports in Hebrew media, which the IDF has not confirmed, of a decrease in the intensity of the fighting in Gaza in recent days. Egyptian and Qatari mediators have been trying to secure a framework for a new ceasefire, though the sides do not appear to be close to an agreement.
The IDF said troops in Gaza City identified four cells of gunmen Friday, leading to aerial strikes that killed 15 gunmen within the space of three hours. Additional gunmen were killed in gunfights with the troops, according to the IDF, which characterized the battles as “intensive.”
North of Gaza City, in Beit Lahiya, reservists of the 551st Brigade demolished two buildings that the IDF said were used by Hamas. The troops found large amounts of military equipment in the buildings, including explosives and weapons.
Meanwhile, soldiers of the Border Defense Corps’ 414th Combat Intelligence Collection unit identified a detachment of gunmen in Shejaiya in the northern Gaza Strip, with one toting an RPG launcher. An aircraft eliminated them in a strike that troops on the ground helped direct.
On Friday, the IDF said that its troops had demolished a hideout apartment belonging to Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar in northern Gaza along with a large tunnel system underneath it.
Sinwar continues to evade capture as the IDF says that it is closing in on him. Sinwar’s capture or elimination would give Israel a morale-boosting operational victory that it has desperately sought since the war began three months ago.
Reservists from the 14th Armored Brigade located Sinwar’s hideout on the outskirts of Gaza City Friday. The elite Yahalom combat engineering unit subsequently found in the hideout a 20-meter tunnel shaft, which they demolished along with the hideout. The shaft led to a 218-meter-long tunnel with several branches, according to the IDF.
The underground passages featured electricity, air filtration systems, plumbing, resting and prayer rooms, and other equipment aimed at allowing senior Hamas members to remain hidden for long periods.
On Monday, Sinwar issued his first public statement since October 7, expressing defiance while inflating his terror group’s achievements in the war.
Sinwar has been accused of overseeing the preparations and planning for the October 7 onslaught, during which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists poured into Israel from the land, air and sea, brutally killing more than 1,200 people and seizing some 240 hostages.
In response to the attack, the deadliest in the country’s history, Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas from Gaza and end its 16-year rule, and launched an aerial campaign and subsequent ground operation.
Gazans ‘exhausted’
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said Friday that at least 21,507 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since war with Israel broke out nearly 12 weeks ago, including 187 fatalities over the past 24 hours. A statement from the ministry added that 55,915 people had been wounded in Gaza during the fighting.
Figures issued by Hamas cannot be independently verified and include both civilians and terror operatives killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires.
Israel says it is making an effort to avoid harm to civilians while fighting a terror group embedded within the civilian population. It has long accused Gaza-based terror groups of using Palestinians in the Strip as human shields, operating from sites, including schools and hospitals, which are supposed to be protected.
According to IDF assessments, some 8,500 terror operatives have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Friday reiterated his call for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” while the World Health Organization warned of the growing threat of the spread of infectious diseases among Gazans.
With the war dragging on, Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a reality of hardship and uncertainty.
Umm Louay Abu Khater, a 49-year-old woman who had fled to Rafah from Khan Younis, told an AFP reporter: “Enough with this war! We are totally exhausted,” adding: “We are constantly displaced from one place to another in cold weather. The bombs keep falling on us day and night.”
Ahmed al-Baz, a 33-year-old Palestinian displaced from Gaza City, said this year had been “the worst in my life,” and was “a year of destruction and devastation.” Speaking in Rafah, surrounded by tents in a makeshift camp, he added: “We just want the war to end, and start the new year at home, with a ceasefire declared.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that around half of Gaza’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed in the war, a figure that also accounts for almost 70 percent of homes. The report cited analysis of satellite photography of the Strip and other remote sensing methods.
The paper noted buildings hit include factories, houses of prayer, schools, shopping malls and hotels. Israel has said many schools, mosques and other buildings have been hit after being used for military purposes and as bases of operation by Gaza terror groups.
WSJ added that only eight of Gaza’s 36 hospitals can accept patients, and that most basic infrastructure including water, electricity and communications is demolished.
“The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the history of aerial bombing, told the paper.
Eighty-one trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom and Egypt’s Rafah crossings Friday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
Kerem Shalom had been closed for three days due to what OCHA said were security incidents, including an IDF drone strike, the seizure of aid by desperate locals and unannounced and uncoordinated prisoner and casualty transfers.
“The volume of aid remains woefully inadequate,” OCHA said in a statement. “This is an impossible situation for the people of Gaza and for those trying to help them. The fighting must stop.”
Israel maintains that it is inspecting hundreds of trucks every day and that the reason for the bottleneck is the failure of UN facilitators to keep up with the pace. The UN has argued that mass aid delivery is impossible amid the IDF’s aerial and ground operations in Gaza.
Israel reopened its Kerem Shalom Crossing on December 17 for aid to enter Gaza directly from Israel for the first time since the war’s outbreak. However, the move hasn’t led to the desired increase in aid delivery.
Two hundred trucks entered Gaza each day of last month’s week-long truce. The daily figure has not come close to that number since. Before the war and the massive humanitarian crisis that it has sparked, roughly 500 trucks of aid were entering Gaza each day.
US news outlet Axios and Israeli website Ynet, both citing unnamed Israeli officials, reported that Qatari mediators had told Israel that Hamas was prepared to resume talks on new hostage releases in exchange for a ceasefire. A Hamas delegation was in Cairo on Friday to discuss an Egyptian plan proposing renewable ceasefires, AFP reported.
Publicly, Hamas has said it will not consider any ceasefire before Israel announces an end to the Gaza campaign, a non-starter for Jerusalem.
