Israeli troops operating in southern Gaza’s Rafah killed numerous gunmen over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces said on Saturday, as the offensive against the terror group Hamas continued throughout the Strip.
Fighting in Rafah on Saturday was led by the Givati Brigade, which engaged in several clashes with terror operatives, the IDF said. The military added that the 401st Armored Brigade carried out “significant activity” against Hamas sites and operatives in Rafah’s northwestern Tel Sultan neighborhood.
In the enclave’s center, reservists of the Alexandroni Brigade raided several Hamas sites in the Netzarim Corridor — an IDF-controlled east-west strip separating the territory in two — and called in an airstrike against a group of gunmen in a building, the IDF said.
Nearby in Deir al-Balah, the IDF said it had struck a building on Friday in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone, which it said was used by the Hamas-linked Elkahira organization, having been a “central part of the infrastructure used to store and transfer large amounts of funds to terror organizations in the Gaza Strip, as well as to carry out terror activities” since the beginning of the war.
The IDF said the strike was carried out after it ordered the evacuation of Palestinian civilians in the area. The IDF also said a fighter jet launched “precision munitions” in the attack, to mitigate harm to civilians. It was unclear how much damage was inflicted by the strike.
In a separate attack on Thursday, the IDF said it killed an employee of Elkahira who had transferred funds to terror groups in Gaza, including the military wing of Hamas.
Palestinian health officials said at least 13 people were killed in three Israeli airstrikes that hit refugee camps in central Gaza overnight.
Among the dead in Nuseirat Refugee Camp and Bureij Refugee Camp were three children and one woman, according to Palestinian ambulance teams that transported the bodies to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The 13 corpses were counted by AP journalists at the hospital.
The latest casualties followed a rare moment of hope in war-ravaged Gaza after medical teams recovered a live baby from a heavily pregnant Palestinian mother killed in an airstrike that hit her home in Nuseirat late Thursday evening.
Heavily pregnant Ola al-Kurd, 25, was killed along with six others in the blast but was quickly rushed by emergency workers to Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza in the hope of saving the unborn child. Hours later, doctors told The Associated Press that a baby boy had been delivered.
The still-unnamed newborn is stable but has suffered from a shortage of oxygen and has been placed in an incubator, Dr. Khalil Dajran said. The baby boy’s father was wounded in the same strike but survived.
In the renewed operation in Gaza City in the enclave’s north, more than 150 terror operatives were killed over the past week, the IDF said.
The raid, launched earlier this month, is being led by the 99th Division, with the Alexandroni, 8th, and Commando brigades, and the elite Multi-Domain Unit.
During the first week of the operation, troops had raided UNRWA’s headquarters, where Hamas had regrouped.
In recent operations, the IDF said the troops raided several multi-story buildings in Gaza City where Hamas operatives were holed up, adding that they located weapons, equipment belonging to Hamas’s naval forces, and intelligence materials, the army said.
In addition to the estimated 150 gunmen, the IDF said troops demolished more than 100 sites belonging to terror groups and located an underground weapons manufacturing site.
Rocket sirens sounded on Saturday in the southern communities of Kissufim and Talmei Yosef. In both cases, the IDF said the sirens were false alarms and no rockets had been fired.
War broke out on October 7 when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 327.