IDF says Golani troops engaged in ‘intense fighting’ with Hamas in Gaza City’s Shejaiya
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
The IDF says troops of the Golani Infantry Brigade are engaged in “intense fighting” with Hamas’s Shejaiya battalion in the Gaza City neighborhood.
According to military estimates, some 600 Hamas operatives have been killed by the IDF in Shejaiya over the past two weeks, 200 of them by Golani soldiers.
The IDF says the Golani troops have also located and destroyed more than 10 tunnel shafts in the neighborhood. The soldiers also seized weapons and intelligence materials found in the homes of Hamas operatives.
Combat engineers operating with Golani located and destroyed dozens of rocket launchers, including some near schools and cemeteries, according to the IDF.
The IDF says the troops have encountered Hamas operatives opening fire, launching RPGs, and setting off explosive devices while using civilian buildings as cover in Shejaiya.
The commander of the Golani Brigade, Col. Yair Palai, says his forces “will do everything so that the residents of the [Gaza border communities] and the south can return to their homes, and so that Hamas does not rule Gaza anymore.”
“This neighborhood was and still is an established stronghold of the Hamas terror organization, and this is a problem that needs to be uprooted,” he adds.
Golani has a bitter connection with Shejaiya. Last week, 10 soldiers, including two senior officers, were killed in an ambush by Hamas in the neighborhood. Before that, in the 2014 war, seven soldiers were killed when their APC was hit in fighting in Shejaiya. The remains of one of the seven, Sgt. Oron Shaul, were captured by Hamas and are still in their hands.
