This (Wednesday) morning, the IDF announced the death Tal Lahat, a fighter in the Magellan special unit. Lahat, A 21-year-old from Kfar Saba, left behind his parents, siblings and a girlfriend. His uncle said of him: “Tal took everything with a smile. I never heard him whine during the war. At no point did he say ‘we’re busting our ass’, it’s always small to him, ‘we’re fine, good, with the company’… He was a child full of dreams and knew how to make them all come true. A Family boy… The love of his life was photography. He wanted to study and become a military photographer. At the last minute, he decided to go as far as he could and went to Magellan. A flower and joy of every moment. One of the members of his unit defined him as the heart of the team. All heart.”
Ran, Tal’s father, said: “Tal’s main motto, together with the other fighters on his team, was ‘We are in Gaza to bring back the hostages,’ that led him all the time, that has given meaning to all their fighting and risk in Gaza, that is what spoke most to them.” Tal has been fighting the war since its first day, when on October 7, he fought terrorists at Kibbutz Nahal Oz and helped save dozens of residents. And now, Tal was killed by a sniper in the center of the Gaza Strip – the exact location was not given by the army, but it is probably around the Sabra neighborhood in the western part of Gaza City.
The Magellan unit is affiliated with the Commando Brigade, which is organically associated with the 98th Division, which has been operating in the Gaza City area for the past month, mainly in the Shajaiya neighborhood and now in the Sabra area, not far from the Netzarim corridor created by the IDF in the center of the Gaza Strip. The operation is progressing well, and so far many tunnels have been destroyed, infrastructure has been decommissioned, and more than 100 terrorists have been killed in clashes with IDF soldiers. The Harsh battle for the neighborhod, which was fought during the month of December (in which over 10 Golani soldiers were killed), weakened the neighborhood and brought it to the current situation, in which the IDF is able to maneuver relatively freely.