Operation Iron Swords - Day 70 - 15 December 2023
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NEW - Operations NEW - Operations Maps NEW - By-Standers NEW - Axis of Resistance NEW - Allied for Democracy UPDATED - Oasis of Martyrs UPDATED - Hostages |
According to Israeli media reports, the hostages had escaped Hamas captivity and were heading towards IDF soldiers when they were mistakenly identified and shot. The IDF said the hostage group was misidentified as a threat amid the fierce, ongoing battles in Gaza's urban terrain. Their bodies were transported to Israel after the accidental shooting for forensic examination and hostage identification. Military officials notified all affected families. The IDF expressed deep regret, emphasizing the unfortunate deaths occurred in an active combat zone. Relevant operational lessons were immediately reviewed to prevent recurrence.
For the fifth time since the start of the war, Israel completely cut off communications networks in the Gaza Strip.
Abu Ubaida, spokesman for the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades stressed that what the Israeli occupation army officially announces regarding the numbers of deaths and injuries is unreal, and that “what we see disintegrating is the enemy’s army, not the Qassam Brigades.” He explained that “the testimonies and accounts of our Mujahideen about their killing of enemy foot soldiers document many times the announced number of those killed.”
Operational Update
Abu Ubaida, spokesman for the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades - the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), confirmed that they targeted more than 100 Israeli military vehicles within 5 days. Abu Ubaida added - in a recorded speech broadcast on Al Jazeera - “Our mujahideen are valiant and fighting heroic battles that will be immortalized in the pages of history,” noting that they are fighting a force heavily armed with lethal weapons, equipment and ammunition and supported by aircraft.
Al-Qassam spokesman indicated that Phalange fighters used anti-fortified shells and demolished houses on the heads of Israeli soldiers, pointing out that “the enemy uses mercenaries during its operation, which it claims is an existential war.”
Al-Qassam spokesman continued, “The American administration is operating its air bridges to support this entity as if it were fighting a superpower,” stressing that the Palestinian people are still fighting this unprecedented battle since the beginning of the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood 70 days ago. Al-Qassam spokesman stressed that “our mujahideen still have their hands on the trigger and are lurking for the enemy everywhere,” and that “the clash of our mujahideen with the enemy forces revealed what a weak and cowardly army it is.”
Arab Experts and analysts believed that the Israeli occupation, which destroyed 80% of the Gaza Strip, is seeking to reformulate the priorities of its goals during the next stage, but the Palestinian resistance does not It remains cohesive and launches rockets from the areas that the occupation claims to have controlled. The military and strategic expert, Major General Fayez Al-Duwairi, expected that Israel will move during the next stage to what is called “surgical operations,” where ground operations will be limited, and aerial bombardment will focus on targeting the leaders of the Palestinian resistance. He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not achieve any military goals from the war he is waging on the Gaza Strip, and ground operations may stop within two to three weeks, but this matter is related to the American position, which Al-Duwairi described as varied.
CBS News was American officials reported that Tel Aviv informed Washington of the completion of the current phase of intensive air strikes and a major ground operation within two or three weeks. However, an American official said that this does not mean the end of combat operations. Commenting on what was reported by this network, Al-Duwairi confirmed that there will be a reformulation of the priorities of the objectives, and the Israeli forces will be used more specifically than is happening now, in addition to a direction to reduce escalation and bombing and provide safe places for the displaced, which is the direction that comes after the occupation destroyed 80% of the Gaza Strip.
He added that the occupation army, which failed to achieve the goals it set, the minimum of which was rescuing detainees held by the Palestinian resistance, is now seeking to reformulate operations, as they will be based on updated information and in coordination with the joint operations room, which includes 5 international intelligence agencies (American, British, French, Italian, German) alongside the Israeli intelligence service.
As for whether there is new data on which Israel relies in its aggression against Gaza, Al-Duwairi explained that the intelligence services will not be able to determine the locations of the detainees, because the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) It cannot place them in one place, and therefore they are distributed according to the vision of the battle with the occupation.
The military expert reiterated the performanceof the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades - the military wing of the Hamas movement - and the rest of the resistance factions in their fighting with the occupation soldiers, stressing that they They are still cohesive and able to manage the battle, and despite the occupation claiming that it has controlled 40% of the northern Gaza Strip, resistance missiles are launched and reach the center of occupied Palestine.
The head of the Department of Political Science at Hebron University, Dr. Bilal Al-Shobaki, indicated that the goals declared by the occupation have not been achieved, which is the return of detainees, and what they consider to be undermining the military capabilities of Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian factions. He believed that the issue was no longer related only to the clashes inside the Gaza Strip between resistance fighters and occupation soldiers, but rather to the missiles fired by the Palestinian resistance from areas that the occupation claimed to have controlled.
On the other hand, he linked the new American statements regarding the relationship with Israel to internal and external pressures, as well as to the data on the ground, but Al-Shobaki downplayed the issue of the dispute between Washington and Tel Aviv regarding the war in Gaza, stressing that part of the American speeches such as the necessity of sparing civilians, and that there is a political horizon for the Israeli military operation, which is for internal media consumption and for Washington’s allies abroad.
He said that the American speeches are accompanied by reassurance to the Israeli occupation that there is American support for the continuation of the war, with advice to rearrange this process so that it is more accurate, noting that what happened during this day of targeting a school containing Al Jazeera correspondents confirms that everything that comes from Washington Israel does not take it into account.
The movement used a large stock of weapons, in addition to its knowledge of the precise terrain of the Strip, and in addition to the presence of an extensive tunnel network, all of which enabled the movement to transform the streets of Gaza into a deadly maze for the Israeli occupation soldiers. Reuters report says that the weapons possessed by Hamas range from drones loaded with bombs to anti-tank weapons with powerful double explosive charges.
Reuters interviewed an Israeli military commander and military analysts, in addition to a source in the Hamas movement, regarding the ground battles in the Gaza Strip. Yaakov Amedro, a retired general in the Israeli army and former national security advisor who now works at the US National Security Institute, says that there is no comparison between the war today and the war of 2014, noting that the Israeli army “did not find a good solution for the tunnels.” whose network has expanded significantly over the past decade.
The agency reports that the Hamas movement published video clips showing fighters carrying cameras on their bodies and moving through buildings to fire hand-held missiles at Israeli military armor. It adds that one of these videos, published on December 7, was from the Shujaiya area, east of Gaza City, where both sides of the fighting reported violent clashes.
It quoted a Hamas source from inside Gaza - who requested to remain anonymous - as saying that the fighters “move very close to the enemy forces to carry out ambushes, taking advantage of the land that we know as others do not,” and they often move or appear from tunnels. or his part, an Israeli commander who participated in 2014 said that expanding the scope of this operation meant there were more forces on the ground, giving Hamas “defender advantages,” so higher casualties among Israeli forces were expected. Israeli Channel 12 showed an army reserve unit, warning of booby-trapped doors, breaking the wall of a building to enter a room and discover an ammunition store.
“Hamas has taken huge steps to strengthen its forces since 2014,” says Eyal Benko, who was a senior official in the Israeli intelligence services and now works at the Bar-Ilan Center for Strategic Studies at Begin-Sadat University. He pointed out that the movement obtained some advanced weapons, such as “Kornet” anti-tank missiles of Russian design, "with help from Iran". He added that Hamas has also mastered building other weapons in Gaza, such as rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPG-7), and the fighters now have a larger ammunition stockpile.
But Alexander Greenberg, a former Israeli intelligence officer at the Institute for Strategy and Security in Jerusalem, concluded by saying, “Hamas may adopt new tactics, but in principle, it is still a resistance movement engaged in street warfare.”
Maps
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All maps are lies. But it is impossible to comprehend the war in Gaza without reference to maps, otherwise the entire conflict is reduced to an endless series of meaningless acts of random violence and the suffering of civilians. Evidently, different mappers have different ideas of how to depict the war in Gaza, notably those that seek to depict Israeli progress in the ground campaign. Part of the problem is latency. The news that forms the basis of the maps takes time to filter out to mappers, and the cartographers take time in crafting their maps, and it takes time to curate them. Thes processes are uneven among mappers, so their maps may differ in detail. Probably there is some ideological bias, or at least thematic apperception, which is understandable in wartime. It may come as no surprise that al-Jazeera maps depict rather less Israeli territorial progress than other sources. Finally, there remains the epistemological question of just exactly what are the colored in areas depicting. Naively, this might be understood as areas of Israeli control, that are no longer contested by the HAMAS. Or possibly these are areas of Israeli presence, in many of which the possibility of an RPG-wielding HAMAS militant popping out of a tunnel unexpectedly remains a live possibility. With the "zero-range" combat characterized by small unit tactics on both sides, maps may be prey to a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. |
Bystanders
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Axis of Resistance
Hamas leader Osama Hamdan said that there was nothing left for Netanyahu and his war chiefs but to declare their failure to achieve any goal. The Hamas leader stressed that there will be no negotiation regarding the prisoners until after a complete cessation of the aggression against the Gaza Strip.
Allied for Democracy
Netanyahu said that he informed Sullivan that the war would continue until what he described as complete victory was achieved. While the American official stressed that the Israeli government announced that it “does not intend to occupy Gaza in the long term, and supervision of Gaza, management of Gaza, and Gaza’s security must return to the Palestinians.”
US officials stated that the White House is pressing behind closed doors for a faster end to the very intense phase of the Israeli war on Gaza, while press sources spoke Israeli newspaper reported that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan held talks with Israeli officials about starting negotiations to release detainees held by Hamas.
A senior American official said that Sullivan discussed the military operation in Gaza and how to transform it from a high-intensity operation to a less intense operation, adding that the Israelis informed Sullivan of their intention to adopt a timetable.
The American official believed that the timetables for the Israeli military operation do not matter as much as the circumstances that will govern it, stressing that the next stage will include more precise operations based on intelligence information about how to target specific infrastructure, he said.
As reported by CBS News, Another American official said that Tel Aviv informed Washington of the completion of the current phase of intensive air strikes and the large ground operation within two or three weeks, and the American official said that this does not mean the end of combat operations.
A CBS News source spoke: Regarding the decrease in the intensity of aerial bombardment and the focus on non-random raids. The American official added that Israel will continue to pursue the head of Hamas in Gaza Yahya al-Sinwar, and the leader of the movement’s military wingMohammed Al-Deif, and his deputyMarwan Issa.
Butcher's Bill / Oasis of Martyrs
Palestinian armed group Hamas launched thousands of missiles at Israel and deployed its militants to infiltrate Jewish settlements near the country’s border with Gaza on 07 October 2023. The 1,200 Israelis killed on the first day would be the equivalent of 36,000 Americans killed in an attack, as a proportion to Israel’s population of 9.3 million people (compared to 332 million in the USA). Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated: “Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day". PM Netanyahu stated "On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis. Maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s twenty 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy."
It is the second largest loss inflicted on the Israeli forces after the 1973 war, as the Palestinian resistance killed more than 1,200, wounded more than 5,132 others, and captured more than 250, most of them military personnel, some of whom were high-ranking officers in the army.
The HAMAS Ministry of Health in the besieged sector announced that the number of victims of the Israeli operation its beginning had risen to about 18,787 martyrs. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. United Nations experts announced reports that the Israeli bombing of Gaza since October 7 led to the death of about 12,000 women and children.
The number wounded was 50,897. The Palestinian Government Media Office in Gaza had said many days earlier that the number of missing people had risen to more than 7,500 [double the 3,750 previously reported], including 1,800 children still under the rubble, including 4,700 children and women.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health explained that the death toll in the West Bank since the beginning of this year has risen to 465, including 257 martyrs since last October 7.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry released an official casualty numbers in fighting, saying 77 people were killed and 251 wounded since the start of the war on Gaza.
Israel revised down the death toll from the October Hamas attacks in southern Israel from 1,400 to 1,200. IDF had said previously it was holding 1,500 bodies of terrorists, a total that now would increas to about 1,700.
The IDF acknowledged the killing of two officers and a soldier in battles in the Gaza Strip, bringing the death toll to 124 between an officer and a soldier since the start of the ground incursion, while the number of wounded since the beginning of the ground operation rose to 652, including 146 seriously injured. This brings the total number of dead officers and soldiers whose names the Israeli army allowed to be published to 434 since the Palestinian resistance launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th.
At least 10,157 Israelis were injured, according to i24 TV. The IDF updated the number of soldiers injured in the war and attacks on October 7 to 1,683.
Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper had reported that 5,000 soldiers had been wounded since the beginning of the war on October 7, and that the Ministry of Defense had recognized 2,000 soldiers as disabled so far.
In a statement to Al Jazeera Net, Iraqi military expert Dr. Muhannad Al-Azzawi said that the high percentage of officers among those killed in the occupation army in Gaza is due to two reasons: The first is that fighting inside cities and in close combat, all fighters are officers and soldiers in the target area without distinction.
One of the fighting methods in cities is the decentralized fighting method due to the nature of the alleys and crowded neighborhoods, as in the Gaza Strip, which makes it easy to hunt them down by targeting methods such as sniping and ambushes. These factors give the Palestinian resistance flexibility in choosing targets and snatching valuable ones.
The second reason - according to the military expert - is organization. The Israeli occupation army brought into the war formations, regiments and battalions from outside the command, and these people lack precise knowledge of the battlefield and the target bank, as well as reserve conscripts who engage in military action, and they only have intermittent military experience and without updating or updating. Previous coexistence with the theater of operations, and here they become easy targets for the resistance.
Al-Azzawi confirms that the high number of officers killed in the ranks of the occupation army indicates the ferocity of the battles and fighting in the neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip, especially since the resistance fights with continuous experience and has prepared well for this battle, and fighting in cities always inflicts heavy losses on the attackers.
Hostages
Israel estimates there are 116 living hostages in Palestinian custody. Israel declared 19 out of 135 people in Gaza captivity dead in absentia, after announcing its forces had recovered the bodies of two hostages. Israel considers those still held by Hamas to be hostages regardless of whether they are dead or alive.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy earlier had told reporters that Hamas still held 137 captives. The resistance released 10 Israeli detainees, 4 Thais and 2 Russian women, who were released outside the agreement. Over the course of 6 days, Israel has received 102 detainees, women and children, including 78 Israelis, in exchange for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners, women and children.
Eylon Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson, told reporters 01 December 2023:
- Hamas still held 137 hostages from the October attacks, in addition to four others who went missing before the war
- The hostages include two children aged four and 10 months, who, Hamas now claims, are dead
- 117 male hostages are still kept in Gaza, including the two children, as well as 20 females
- 126 hostages are Israelis, and 11 others are foreign nationals
- Foreign nationals are eight Thais, one Nepalese, one Tanzanian and one French Mexican citizen
- Ten of the remaining hostages are 75 and older.
- There are seven missing people since the October 7 attack
- Hamas had released 110 hostages so far – 86 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals.
Some of the rest are soldiers, seized when Hamas raided military bases in Israel. They may end up being held the longest. The Israeli military had not specified how many soldiers were captured, nor their ranks.
According to some estimates, Hamas was initially holding nearly 210 of the 240 hostages, while Palestinian Islamic Jihad was holding the remaining 30. About 40 Israelis remained missing. More than 40 hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on October 7th are not currently in the custody of Hamas, the group responsible for the attack, according to a CNN report based on a diplomatic source briefed on the negotiations, CNN's prior reports had indicated that an estimated 40 to 50 hostages were held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other unidentified groups or individuals.
Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said on Hamas’ telegram account that 23 bodies of the 60 missing Israel hostages were trapped under the rubble. “It seems that we will never be able to reach them due to the continued brutal aggression of the occupation against Gaza,” he said.
Palestinian institutions concerned with prisoners’ affairs announced that the Israeli authorities have arrested 4,400 Palestinians in the West Bank and the 1948 territories since last October 7. Israel had earliersaid that, since the beginning of the war, about 2,100 wanted persons have been arrested throughout the IOS Division and the Bekaa and Emekim Brigade, about 1,100 of them are affiliated with Hamas.
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