The Israel Defense Forces announced at noon Saturday that it had completed the capture of the Morag Corridor in the southern Gaza Strip, cutting off the city of Rafah from Khan Younis.
Rafah is now completely surrounded by the military, with the 36th Division holding the Morag Corridor and the Gaza Division operating in the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egypt-Gaza border area.
Also on Saturday, three rockets launched from Gaza at the Sufa and Holit area on the southern section of the border were intercepted by air defenses, the military said. The rocket fire set off alerts in open areas but not in any towns. No one was hurt.
Inside Gaza, the 36th Division’s 188th Armored Brigade pushed into the Morag Corridor from the northwest, while the division’s Golani Infantry Brigade entered from the border in the southeast. Overnight, the two units joined up.
Engineering forces are now constructing a road along the corridor, similar to other Gaza corridors captured by the IDF during the war.
The military will now operate inside areas of Rafah that it had not previously entered to defeat the remaining Hamas forces there. The IDF issued evacuation warnings for civilians in Rafah nearly two weeks ago.
Eventually, the IDF’s buffer zone in southern Gaza will stretch from the Egyptian border to the outskirts of Khan Younis — more than 5 kilometers away — and include the entire city of Rafah within it, totaling around 20% of the Strip.
The IDF’s buffer zone elsewhere along the border with Gaza has also been expanded from several hundred meters to around 2 kilometers in most areas.
Over the past week and a half, during operations in the Morag Corridor area, the IDF says it has eliminated dozens of terror operatives and destroyed Hamas infrastructure, including tunnels.
On Friday, two soldiers were wounded in southern Gaza, one of them seriously, as troops expanded control in the area. An officer was moderately wounded in an exchange of fire with gunmen, with three gunmen killed. Separately, a soldier was seriously injured, apparently from an accidental discharge of a bullet.
The IDF also said Friday that a Hamas sniper commander in Rafah was killed in a recent strike. Ahmad Iyad Muhammad Farhat, the commander of the Hamas terror group’s sniper forces in the terror group’s Tel Sultan Battalion in Rafah, was responsible for advancing and carrying out numerous attacks on Israeli troops in Gaza and against Israel, the IDF said.
The military has struck dozens of targets across Gaza in the past few days, including cells of operatives, buildings used by terror groups, weapons, and other infrastructure.
Also, on Friday, the IDF issued an evacuation warning for Palestinians residing in some areas of eastern Gaza City.
In a post on X, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, Col. Avichay Adraee, published a map of the area to be evacuated, which includes the neighborhoods of Shejaiya, Zeitoun, and Tuffah.
He said that the military would soon operate “with great force” there to “destroy terror infrastructure.” Civilians were called to head for shelters in western Gaza City.
The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when some 5,000 Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 59 hostages — 24 of whom are believed to be alive, and 35 of whom have been confirmed dead — including 58 of those abducted on October 7.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, more than 50,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far. The toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel assesses it has killed about 20,000 combatants in Gaza as of January, as well as some 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.
Israel’s toll in the Gaza ground offensive and military operations along the border stands at 410.