Defense Minister Gallant: IDF ‘closing in’ on Hamas, ready to act in Rafah

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant toured northern Gaza earlier today, saying that the military is readying its actions in Rafah and in areas of the central part of the Strip where the IDF has not yet operated on the ground.

“We are closing in on Hamas. We are preparing to act in Rafah, as well as in the central camps, in order to reach the next stage [which] we will decide according to our priorities,” Gallant says.

“We use the information we captured from the Hamas archives. There are huge amounts of information that we brought from the places we reached, computers, hard drives, servers and other things. All this information is decoded, it is used in order to destroy the tunnels and the nerve centers of Hamas,” he says.

Gallant says Hamas’s tunnel network, used by the terror group to fight Israel and flee, is “little by little turning into a trap.”

“The result is very clear: [Hamas] are getting weaker with each passing day, we are getting stronger. We will go and tighten the rope around the neck of Hamas until we eliminate it,” he says.

Gallant says the war in Gaza will not end until Hamas is dismantled, and that Israel will only make concessions for the release of the hostages the terror group holds.