The 401st Brigade’s raid on Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which began early on Monday morning, has so far produced great results: Nearly 80 terrorists are killed and 300 people are detained, including at least 150 members of Hamas or the PIJ. So far, two IDF soldiers have been killed in the operation – Matan Winogradov and Sebastian Ion, may they rest in peace.
The great success of the operation stems mainly from the secrecy that surrounded it: The IDF managed to keep its intentions secret, while allowing terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip to assume that there was no chance that it would return to Shifa Hospital, where it had already operated twice during the war, and where it had already allegedly destroyed all terror tunnels. It was the destruction of these tunnels that helped capture the terrorists, since when the IDF soldiers succeeded in encircling the building within less than an hour of the beginning of the operation, there was no time for terrorists who had taken refuge inside where to flee. As one of the terrorists captured by IDF forces said: “I understood my options were to die or to be taken prisoner.”
Among the captured prisoners, there are PIJ operatives who fired rockets at Sderot in the past few days; it has not yet been published if a any major official was captured. In any case, the IDF is currently slowly draining patients in the hospital, and has not yet arrived at the emergency room, where it is expected that many more terrorists are hiding. Besides people, the IDF found weapons and intelligence equipment in the hospital compound, both intelligence that can be used by us and intelligence that Hamas stole from IDF bases during events of October 7th – which will help to estimate the degree of intelligence damage caused on that day (although according to the course of the war since that day, And as this latest operation demonstrates, “local Surgery” – Hamas does not seem to have a deep intelligence penetration into the IDF’s daily conduct).
The forces of the 401st Brigade are expected to remain in the hospital area for a few more days, deepen the achievement and finish the drainage. After that, the brigade will leave, but who knows – if Hamas members continue to see the hospital as a safe place, perhaps the IDF will be able to return for the fourth time, until Hamas stops raising it’s head, or has no more heads to raise.
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