During the night, the Air Force carried out a series of intensive attacks in southern and western Khan Yunis, parallel to ground operations that are ongoing at this very moment. This is a final effort toward the end of the fighting in the city; Hamas’s Khan Yunis brigade has already been broken, and so have most of the battalions, and Hamas fighters who remain in the city, are mostly active in forms guerrilla warfare.
This does not mean that the mission will be free of casualties – as was proven on Friday, when an explosion of a booby-trapped house upon a force from the Kfir Brigade, operating in the framework of the 98th Division, led to 14 wounded and 3 killed: Yinon Yitzchak, Dolev Malka and Afiq Teri. But the dismantling of the Hamas battalions forces the terrorists to act in a decentralized manner and lack of coordination, and this significantly impairs their capabilities and the level of threat that exists on our forces and the surrounding communities of the gaza strip (‘Otef’). The large-scale killing of terrorists, together with the destruction of infrastructures, will lead to the deepning of the achievement of the long-term damage to Hamas, in order to achieve the goal of the war – the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities.
In the northern Gaza Strip, our forces left the Zitun neighborhood after reaching the required achievement, and now there are no forces operating in the Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip. At the same time, the residents of the otef and Sderot are gradually returning to their homes, after an evacuation of almost five months. The terrorist organizations fired sporadic mortar shells during the weekend, in a way that only proved their current incompetence in this part of the Gaza Strip. On the northern border, the residents are still very far from returning to their homes, with the mutual attacks continuing at all times, and there remains a long way to go to in order to deter Hizbullah and stop its threat to the north.
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