As the Israel Defense Forces stepped up its ground offensive in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, engaging in firefights with gunmen in the enclave while continuing to carry out airstrikes on Hamas targets, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “dismantling one Hamas battalion at a time” and this will also do eliminate the terror group’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.
Gallant said Israeli forces were attacking terrorist targets in Gaza City from both the south and north and had moved into urban areas.
He said: “Hamas has no borders,” as Israel saw on October 7 with the terror group’s horrific attack and brutal killings. “The Hamas leadership is responsible. We will achieve that leadership,” he promised. “We will make it [Hamas Gaza chief] Yahya Sinwar and eliminate him. If the people of Gaza get there before us, it will shorten the war.”
When the war ends, he said, “there will be no more Hamas in Gaza.” There will be no further security threat to Israel from Gaza, and Israel will have absolute freedom to take whatever security measures it wants against anyone in it Gaza raises its head [to threaten it].”
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The IDF pressed ahead with its ground offensive in the northern part of the enclave on Saturday, with infantry and tanks encountering numerous attempts by Hamas militants to emerge from tunnels and attack troops.
The forces killed several gunmen and located the tunnels, which would later be destroyed, the IDF said. In one clash, ground troops fought a group of 15 Hamas operatives, killing several of them and shelling their observation posts, according to the IDF.
The military also continued to carry out airstrikes on terrorist targets across the Gaza Strip. It said around 120 targets in the Gaza Strip were attacked during the day, including Hamas compounds and anti-tank positions.
The army determined that warplanes struck a Hamas compound on the roof of a building and a tunnel near the building after intelligence gleaned from the Shin Bet’s interrogation of a Hamas member.
Hamas said an attack also targeted the family home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which was used by two of his sons. Hamas had no immediate report on damage or casualties. Haniyeh has lived in Qatar for years.
On Saturday evening, the military released four more names of soldiers killed in the fighting. Her death brings to 28 the number of soldiers killed since Israel launched its ground operation in Gaza last week and to 345 since October 7.
The Associated Press reported that Israeli military strikes killed several civilians at a U.N. shelter and a hospital in the main fighting zone in the northern Gaza Strip. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said two attacks hit a U.N. school north of Gaza City that had been converted into a shelter. Several people in tents in the schoolyard and women who were baking bread in the building were killed.
It was not clear, as the news agency determined, that the attack was Israeli. Palestinian rocket launches have also resulted in several civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.
The IDF did not immediately comment, but says generally that it is targeting Hamas’ terror infrastructure – a vast network of posts, command centers, weapons depots and tunnels – embedded among the civilian population. The army has urged residents of the northern Gaza Strip to move south as it intensifies its activities in the Gaza City area.
An estimated 800,000 Palestinians have fled south from Gaza City and other northern areas amid repeated Israeli calls for evacuation, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, including many who left the country and later returned. Israel also carries out some air strikes in the south.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said Saturday that more than 9,400 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas sparked the war with its murderous attack. Hamas figures cannot be independently confirmed and the terror group has been accused of artificially inflating the death toll. The numbers make no distinction between terrorists and civilians, nor between those killed in Israeli strikes and those killed by hundreds of rockets fired by terror groups that fell short inside the Gaza Strip.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi conducted an assessment of forces inside the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the military said. A video released by the IDF showed Halevi meeting with the commander of the 162nd Division, Brigadier General. General Itzik Cohen and other officers.
Israel declared war to destroy Hamas after the terror group carried out a devastating attack on October 7 in which thousands of terrorists stormed across the border and murdered about 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in their homes and on were killed at a music festival and over 240 were kidnapped.
Rocket fire on Eilat
Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel on Saturday, targeting Sderot and Ashkelon. It was also said that an Ayyash-250 missile with a range of 250 kilometers was fired at the southernmost city of Eilat.
The military said the missile was intercepted by the Arrow air defense system, the second interception since the start of the war after a ballistic missile fired from Yemen at Eilat last week.
Footage from an area north of Eilat showed a trail of smoke, apparently as a result of the interception.
Hamas has fired several Ayyash-250 rockets in the ongoing war without causing any injuries or damage.
The humanitarian situation
The IDF on Saturday accused the terrorist group Hamas of attacking Israeli troops working to open a humanitarian corridor for the evacuation of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip to the south.
On Saturday morning, the IDF’s Arabic-speaking spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, announced that between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. the Gaza Strip’s north-south Salah a-Din road would be open for the evacuation of Palestinians to the southern Gaza Strip.
The IDF said Hamas took advantage of the situation and fired mortars and anti-tank missiles at troops working to open the road to civilians.
It said Hamas did this “to prevent this.” [the road’s] Opening up the movement of Gaza residents.”
The IDF said no soldiers were injured in the attack.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of trying to prevent Palestinians from evacuating the northern Gaza Strip because it wants to keep civilians as human shields near its centers of activity.
Israeli leaders have rejected humanitarian ceasefires in the Gaza Strip as the Israeli military presses ahead with its offensive, and Jerusalem warns that Hamas will exploit any lull in fighting to advance its war effort.
Hamas said on Saturday it had suspended the evacuation of foreign passport holders to Egypt after Israel refused to evacuate some wounded Palestinians to Egyptian hospitals, a border official told AFP.
“No foreign passport holder will be able to leave the Gaza Strip until wounded people who need to be evacuated from hospitals in northern Gaza are transported to Egypt through the Rafah border crossing,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
The official did not provide any information about the identity of the injured. A senior Biden administration official said Friday that Hamas tried to smuggle its fighters out of the Gaza Strip in ambulances that evacuated dozens of wounded Palestinians to Egypt earlier this week.
Two senior Israeli officials told the Times of Israel that Israeli inspectors examining Gaza aid trucks earlier this week discovered several oxygen concentrators designed to ventilate tunnels operated by terrorist organizations in Gaza.
IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip in an image released on November 4, 2023. (Israeli Defense Forces)
On Saturday, Arab leaders in Amman, denouncing the reported deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas, pushed for an immediate ceasefire, even as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that such a move would be counterproductive and could lead to more violence from the terror group .
Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said that “the ongoing bombings are doubling the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and complicating security.” [hostages’] release.”
At a press briefing on Saturday evening, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that after showing that Hamas was using Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip as a terrorist base, the IDF would soon show that it was doing the same in other hospitals in the Gaza Strip Gaza Strip do.
According to the military, Hamas’ main base of operations is located inside and beneath Shifa Hospital.
The US military, meanwhile, announced that another aircraft carrier strike group has arrived in the Middle East, the second deployed amid the region’s ongoing war to target other regional actors, including Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah. to discourage participation.
U.S. Central Command said two guided-missile destroyers and one guided-missile cruiser were among the ships sailing with the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Agencies contributed to this report.