IDF soldier Sgt. Koren Bitan was killed in battle in southern Gaza, the army announced Monday, as Israel intensified operations in the Strip’s north, while fighting raged across the enclave.
Bitan, 19, from Rosh Ha’ayin, was operating with Battalion 450, part of the Bislamach Brigade (School for Infantry Corps Professions and Squad Commanders). He had begun his service in the Kfir Brigade. He is the 353rd IDF soldier killed in Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza.
Separately, the IDF and Shin Bet announced Monday that Samer Abu-Daqa, the head of Hamas’s air array, had been killed in a September airstrike.
According to the statement, Abu-Daqa was among the terrorists who had planned Hamas’s infiltration of Israel with drones and paragliders on October 7, 2023.
Abu-Daqa had served as head of the air array since October 2023, when his predecessor was eliminated by Israel. He had previously served as the head of Hamas’s drone unit, and was in charge of the terror group’s weapon production.
Israel called him “a key source of knowledge,” who played a central role in establishing Hamas’s drone and paraglider units.
In the early hours of Monday, an Israeli airstrike killed three people and wounded 40 others when it hit some tents of displaced Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in the central Gaza Strip city of Deir Al-Balah, where a million people were sheltering, medics said.
The IDF said it had struck a command center inside the compound and accused Hamas of hiding among civilians and using facilities such as hospitals for terror operations.
Footage circulated on social media, which could not immediately be verified, showed several tents set ablaze, as some Palestinians tried ineffectively to put out the fires.
Meanwhile, the IDF said its 162nd, 252nd, and Gaza Divisions killed several gunmen in close-quarter firefights and airstrikes in the Gaza Strip over the past day, without providing specific locations for the clashes.
A Hamas squad that fired an anti-tank missile at a Gaza Division force was taken out in an airstrike called in by the troops, the army said.
Residents of Gaza City, in the Strip’s north, told Reuters that IDF tanks had reached the city’s northern edge, pounding some districts of the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood and forcing families to leave their homes.
Israel has intensified fighting in the area in recent days, saying Hamas has resurfaced there. The escalation has elicited stern comments from Washington and a condemnation from the United Nations warning of an impending humanitarian disaster.
In light of the criticism, Israel said it let 30 trucks into the Strip’s north on Monday. The trucks, carrying flour and food from the UN World Food Programme, were transferred from the Ashdod Port through the Erez West crossing into the northern Gaza Strip, according to the IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which said “all humanitarian aid was transferred following thorough security inspections.”
The statement has not been confirmed by the UN, which insists that nearly no food, water, fuel or supplies have reached the Strip’s north over the past two weeks, with both major crossings closed since October 1.
The cutoff, combined with Israel’s renewed offensive in the area, has raised fears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pursuing the so-called “General’s Plan,” proposed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, which would besiege the northern third of the strip in an effort to prompt a Hamas surrender.
Responding to a query from The Times of Israel Monday, an adviser to Netanyahu denied the plan was being pursued.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Monday that it had begun the second round of a polio vaccination campaign launched last month after the Strip registered its first polio case in 25 years — a 10-month-old boy, now paralyzed in one leg.
A second dose of the polio vaccine will be administered to children under 10 in Gaza’s center over the next three days before the campaign is expanded to the north and south, the health ministry said.
Health workers succeeded in administering the first dose of the vaccine to around 560,000 children, despite myriad challenges, including ongoing fighting, the breakdown of law and order, and widespread damage to roads and infrastructure.
The World Health Organization said humanitarian pauses to facilitate the campaign last month were largely observed.
The virus resurfaced as waste has accumulated in the Strip and its water become contaminated during the war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s onslaught on October 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Israel’s counteroffensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The figure cannot be verified and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel said it had killed some 17,000 combatants in battle as of August, and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.