Twenty-one Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza on Monday when two buildings rigged for demolition by their army collapsed after a Hamas rocket strike— marking Israel’s deadliest military incident since the war began.
Another three soldiers died in fighting in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, leading Israeli Prime Mininster Benjamin Netanyahu to call Monday “one of the most difficult days” of the war.
The 21 fallen soldiers had been operating more than a third of a mile from the Israeli border city of Kissufim on Monday, with the troops preparing to blow up two Hamas sites with planted explosives, the Times of Israel reports.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Tuesday that as the soldiers were completing their task, a terrorist appeared and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank protecting the ground soldiers.
The blast killed at least two soldiers and wounded several others, according to IDF sources, with a follow-up explosion triggering the mines that the troops had placed around the two buildings.
“The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them,” Hagari told reporters.
Hagari noted that while the detonation of the mines remains under investigation, it was likely caused by a second RPG fired at the troops.
The dead soldiers were part of the IDF’s 205th and 261st Brigades and ranged in age from 22 to 40, according to the Israeli military.
“The best sons of this country, who volunteered to defend the home and paid the most expensive price,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Col Hertzi Halevi said in a statement describing the fallen. “We share in the grief of their families for the heavy loss, and they know that the pain is too much to bear.”
Halevi added that the mission the soldiers were carrying out was to ensure Hamas could no longer operate in the area and facilitate the return of the Palestinian and Israeli residents who have been displaced by the war.
The incident is the single deadliest incident for the IDF since the start of its ground incursion into Gaza. Israel’s military death toll since it placed boots on the ground is now at 219.
Along with the 21 soldiers killed near the border, an additional three soldiers were killed during an assault on Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city, on Monday.
Given the two dozen deaths within the span of 24 hours, Netanyahu described Monday as “one of the most difficult days” of the war.
“In the name of our heroes, for the sake of our lives, we will not stop fighting until absolute victory,” he said.
To that end, the Israeli military has now surrounded Khan Younis in southern Gaza. The city has recently seen the most intense fighting since December, as the IDF focuses on eliminating Hamas from the region and locating and rescuing the more than 130 hostages that remain in Gaza.
The 98th Division is leading the Khan Younis offensive, which began Sunday, with soldiers directing a series of airstrikes on Hamas sites there and confronting gunmen on the ground, the Times said.
The fighting in Khan Younis is once again forcing countless Palestinians to flee further south or west after hundreds of thousands sought refuge in the city during the peak of the fighting in northern Gaza.
The intense bombardments and gunfire in southern Gaza will likely carry on, as a temporary truce deal presented by Israel is still “far from being a proposal,” an Israeli official familiar with the talks told CNN Tuesday.
The tentative Israeli pitch, which would see all the hostages in Gaza freed in phases in exchange for a two-month cease-fire, is currently just “a way to check whether the framework will work,” the official said, adding that “many steps need to be taken” first.
The reported deal outright rejects two of the biggest conditions sought after by Hamas: the freedom of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the IDF’s exit from Gaza.
As the fighting in Gaza continues to escalate, so too does the risk of war in the region spreading, as Yemen’s Houthi terror group, which is sympathetic to Hamas, vowed that overnight airstrikes led by the US and United Kingdom on some of its strongholds “will not go unanswered.”
The group claimed four of its governorates were hit when the Western allies launched 18 airstrikes in the region, with 12 attacks striking the capital of Sana’a.
The US and UK said in a statement that only eight sites were hit by the airstrikes in Yemen.
The Western nations are expected to announce new sanctions against the Houthis in the coming days after re-listing the group as a terror organization for its repeated attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea as a show of solidarity with Hamas.
“We’re going to use the most effective means at our disposal to cut off the Houthis’ financial resources, where they are used to fund these attacks,” UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told his Parliament on Tuesday.
With Post wires