Israeli forces have completely dismantled Hamas’ “military framework” in northern Gaza and killed around 8,000 militants in that area, a military spokesperson said on Saturday. Army spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters said the Israel Defence Forces has also seized tens of thousands of weapons in that area and millions of documents.
“We have completed the dismantling of the Hamas military framework in the northern Gaza Strip,” Hagari said. He added that Hamas militants were now operating in the area only sporadically and “without commanders”.
“Now the focus is on dismantling Hamas in the centre of the Gaza Strip and in the south of the Gaza Strip,” Hagari said while acknowledging that the task will take time.
“In the Jabaliya area, we eliminated the battalion commander, the deputy brigade commanders, and 11 company commanders leading the terrorists in the field. The senior terrorist we eliminated in the area is Ahmad Randor… Eliminating the commanders made it difficult for the terrorists to fight organised and led to many of them surrendering,” the army spokesperson said.
“Jabalya is a densely populated area… Before entering such a dense area for combat, we evacuate the population, aiming to prevent harm and protect the civilians…In two hospitals in the area, Kamal Adwan… and the Indonesian Hospital, underground infrastructure, weapons, and military equipment were established. In both, we carried out special operations to dismantle the terror infrastructure, without harming doctors, medical teams, or patients.”
How IDF carried out Jabalya operations
The IDF said before entering such a dense area for combat, “we evacuate the population, aiming to prevent harm and protect the civilians while allowing military action, as it deprives Hamas of protection under the guise of the population and allows us to distinguish between the population and Hamas terrorists and target them”.
“We struck underground infrastructure, terrorists, lookout posts, and explosive rigged houses. Just in Jabaliya alone, we struck about 670 air targets before the entry of the ground forces. We struck precisely, intelligence-based, and according to international law. All this allowed optimal entry conditions for IDF forces,” the spokesperson said.
Five objectives
Dismantling Hamas consists of five objectives – the first, eliminating Hamas commanders, thus impacting its command and control. “In these strikes, in the Jabaliya area we eliminated the battalion commander, the deputy brigade commanders, and 11 company commanders leading the terrorists in the field. The senior terrorist we eliminated in the area is Ahmad Randor; you can see him here in the picture, sitting with his command echelon in his underground bunker, 40 meters underground. We precisely struck and eliminated all the people with him. Eliminating the commanders made it difficult for the terrorists to fight organized and led to many of them surrendering,” he said.
The second objective is ground combat against the terrorists. IDF forces encircled and cleared the Jabaliya area, meaning the combination of armoured forces, about 200 tanks, combat engineering forces, infantry forces, and special forces encircled the Jabaliya area from several directions simultaneously. All this with intelligence and air support from dozens of aircraft that strike any threat quickly. IDF ground forces directed the fighter jets that struck about 300 targets. This collaboration between the Israeli Air Force and the ground forces has not been seen in any war to date.
The third objective is to gather intelligence in the field. “We have located computers, maps, communication devices, and found hard drives from which we downloaded about 70 million intelligence files, which are now being studied and analyzed by the Intelligence Directorate (J2) and the Israeli Security Agency (ISA). We interrogated many terrorists in the field, in collaboration with the ISA, working shoulder to shoulder, a practice that yields remarkable achievements in the war. In Jabaliya, many terrorists have surrendered, whom we are questioning. As a result of this, we have gathered intelligence about senior Hamas operatives, including documentation, as you can see in this picture, of Muhammad Deif, which we retrieved from a hard drive,” Hagari said.
The fourth objective is to locate and destroy rockets, weapons, and the sites where they are manufactured. “We located and destroyed about 40,000 weapons across the Gaza Strip, some of which were found in schools, hospitals, mosques, and under the beds of children,” he said.
The fifth objective for dismantling Hamas is to destroy its underground infrastructure. “In Jabaliya alone, we found 8 km of underground tunnels and more than 40 tunnel shafts. Inside the tunnels, we located Hamas’ northern headquarters near there, we retrieved the bodies of five hostages and brought them back to be buried in Israel.”
Six people killed on Sunday
Six people were killed on early Sunday during an Israeli raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said. “An Israeli occupation bombardment on a group of citizens killed six people in Jenin,” said the Palestinian Authority-run Ministry of Health, which is based in the West Bank.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported early Sunday that a major deployment of Israeli forces was underway in Jenin.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to crush Gaza’s Hamas rulers after they carried out the deadliest attack in the country’s history on October 7. It resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, most of them civilians, reports suggest. The militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel.
Israel responded by bombarding the territory and sending in ground forces, killing at least 22,722 people, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Speaking about military efforts to dismantle Hamas in the central and southern Gaza Strip, Hagari said, “We will do it in a different way” without elaborating.
“The refugee camps in the central Gaza Strip are crowded and full of terrorists,” he said. In the south, the large urban landscape of Khan Yunis has an elaborate underground network of tunnels, he said.
“It takes time.”
Earlier on Saturday, Netanyahu said his government had directed the army to “eliminate Hamas”, return all the hostages and ensure that Gaza will “never again be a threat to Israel”.
“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all of the goals,” he said in a statement.
(With inputs from agencies)
