IDF chief says army close to defeating Hamas’s Rafah Brigade

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi has said the military is getting close to defeating Hamas’s Rafah Brigade.

“We have very significant achievements in the fighting in Rafah,” Halevi said during a visit to the city in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday, in comments released now.

“This is reflected in the number of terrorists killed, as well as in the destroyed infrastructure [and] tunnels,” he said.

Halevi said the IDF’s control of the so-called Philadelphi Route on the Gaza-Egypt border is “very, very significant.” He said it closes Hamas’s “oxygen pipeline for future smuggling.”

“We are clearly approaching the point where we [can] say we 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,” he said.

Halevi said “many” of the Rafah Brigade’s operatives had been killed, telling the troops that “you will take care to kill as many terrorists as possible and destroy as much infrastructure as possible until the end of the mission here.”