Operation Northern Arrows : From Israel to Hezbollah

"You can hear the planes here; we are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry, but also to continue striking Hezbollah."

"We are not stopping. We will keep attacking and harming them everywhere,."

"To do this, we are preparing for the course of the manoeuvre, and the sense is that your military boots, your manoeuvre boots, will enter enemy territory."

"Your entry there with force… will show (Hezbollah) what it is like to meet a professional combat force."

"You are coming in much stronger than them, much more experienced than them; go in, destroy the enemy there, and go destroy the infrastructure."

"These are the things that will allow us to safely repatriate the residents of the north later."

Troop briefing: Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi

Israeli Merkava tanks are positioned in the north of Israel near the border with Lebanon on October 15, 2023. Photo: AFP

 

A second precision strike in as many days was carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in Beirut. This one eliminated Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of Hezbollah's missile and rocket array. The day before, the earlier strike attempted the assassination of the third-ranking Hezbollah commander, Ali Karaki in the very same region.  Qubaisi, according to the IDF, held a number of key positions within Hezbollah.

 

He "was responsible for the planning and execution of many terrorist actions against the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli citizens", declared an IDF statement. He had planned the kidnapping of three IDF soldiers in October of 2000, killed during or after their abduction. Four years later, as part of a terrorist release deal with Hezbollah, their remains were returned to Israel. 

 

When the attack was launched targeting Qubaisi, he was with other Hezbollah operatives, five of whom were killed, others injured in the airstrike. In a 24-hour period the Israeli Air Fore struck over 1,500 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley; part of "Operation Northern Arrows". This operation has been long in coming. Hezbollah has been sending hundreds of rockets into northern Israel for close to a year, necessitating the evacuation of over 60,000 Israelis. 

 

Hezbollah could not be persuaded, even by return Israeli fire into Lebanon over that period of time, that it should stop bombing across the border into Israel. A year is a long time to wait out a period of constant shelling for people displaced and anxious to return to their homes. Now, when the current operation has been concluded and Hezbollah's rocketry has been stilled, Israelis will be able to return home. 

 

It won't seem the same; vast acreages of forest and fields have been burned as a result of the Hezbollah rockets.

 

A cloud of smoke erupts during an Israeli airstrike on the village of Sujud in southern Lebanon on Sept. 25, 2024. — RABIH DAHER/AFP via Getty Images

 

In turn, thousands of Lebanese have evacuated from the south, following instructions from the IDF to Lebanese civilians to move from their homes where Hezbollah has munitions stored. Like its sister terrorist group Hamas, Hezbollah too excels in putting ordinary Lebanese in harm's way to protect themselves against instant repercussions from Israel returning fire from where it has been launched. 

 

Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanese territory in the Bekaa Valley have also been struck, when more than 100 rockets were fired by Hezbollah into northern Israel.  

"[Israel does not want to send troops in to Lebanon but is prepared o do] whatever necessary [to halt the Hezbollah rocket fire that has driven tens of thousands of Israelis from northern Israel]."

"Israel is] not eager to start any ground invasion anywhere."

"We prefer a diplomatic solution. But if it's not working, we are  using other methods to show the other side that we mean business."

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon

Surrender or Die

"We will continue the war until the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed, until victory."

"Whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality."

"[Every member of Hamas is] marked for death."

"Surrender or die."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Trucks with humanitarian aid wait to enter the Palestinian side of Rafah on the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip on December 11, 2023. (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP)

Skilled at perpetually extracting compassion from the world community, portraying itself as the champion of Palestinian human rights, Hamas has never hesitated to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians for the greater cause of destroying Israel and accomplishing the mass murder of Jews, for their charter sets out just that very goal it is determined to bring to fruition. And while Hamas trains Palestinian children in Gaza to become the next generation of dedicated shaheeds fully incorporated into holy jihad as their purpose in life for the glory inherent in killing Jews, it portrays itself abroad as both liberator and victim.

 

Palestinians generally have taken great pains to persuade the outside world that they are victims of Israeli aggression, that Jews have committed the greatest of sins in 'occupying' land consecrated to Islam by reinstating their ancient ancestral lands into 20th Century Israel for all future generations of Jews to find haven from a hostile world. Jews have rediscovered anew just how hostile the world is to their presence after an all-too-brief post-Holocaust interregnum from discrimination and persecution. 

 

Palestinian public relations campaigns have convinced the gullible West that Palestinians are invested in the concept of a state of their own alongside that of Israel, that perpetual slogan of a 'two-state' solution to the current state of simmering conflict. But it's really a one-state 'solution' that they hold dear, the prospect of which they shield from the West, but pursue by indoctrinating their young to consider Israel an interloper, illegally and immorally sitting on Palestinian geography, and it is the duty of all Palestinians to 'resist the occupation'.

 

Smoke trails are seen as a salvo of rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, as seen from southern Israel, December 21, 2023. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Funding terrorist attacks is a great inducement in support of appealing to Palestinians' sense of nationalism and victimhood. Fatah's campaign is more subtle but it is one of total reclamation of the land and destruction of Israel; Hamas is more upfront about its ambitions, hiding from no outside source its lethal intentions against Israel and Jews living in their ancestral homeland. The savagery of the October 7 incursion into Israel with its planned sadistic rapes, mutilations and mass murder was Hamas showing the world what it is dedicated to: pure terrorism.

 

And show the world it did, in evidence they produced themselves through videos proudly demonstrating their capacity to inflict pain and suffering on the innocent, from babies to the elderly and infirm, from girls and women being repeatedly raped, tortured, mutilated and finally murdered; even dead bodies of old men, of African farm workers, of women are desecrated, driven through the streets of Gaza City, eliciting great whoops of joy at the bodies of dead Israelis, whipping up enthusiasm for striking at the corpses. Incredibly, even the airing of these monstrous atrocities failed to convince the world that Israel's loss is worth mourning.

 

Yet now that Israel is responding, even while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue bombarding Israel with rockets, the world condemns Israel for the deaths of Palestinians. While Israel warns civilians to remove themselves from harm's way, Hamas orders its civilian population to remain in place, and will even shoot to kill those who waver and intend to move to safety. Western media hang on every statistic that the Hamas Health Ministry publishes of Palestinian death numbers attributed to Israeli bombing in Gaza. Wildly inflated numbers to elicit greater sympathy cannot be validated.

 

Israeli soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in this handout picture released on December 21, 2023. Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

 

That bombing is strategic and meant to  target Hamas infrastructure, including the vast network of tunnels it has built under the Gaza Strip's cities, towns and 'refugee camps'. The tunnels and their shafts are built into and under mosques, hospitals, UNRWA-operated schools, apartment complexes and ordinary houses. In those tunnels, weapons caches are stored, and Hamas operatives find safe haven when they shoot off rockets from depots placed in crowded civilian areas, inviting a response from the IDF. The greater the number of civilian casualties, the lustier the outcry from the press and Western governments, playing right into Hamas's schemes.

The tunnels have been useful in providing hiding places for some of the hundreds of Israeli children, elderly, women and men that the terrorist groups and ordinary Palestinian civilians have taken  hostage. Each time rockets are aimed at Israel, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank cheer and applaud when they reach their goals. Support among the Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, is robust, the majority support Hamas and feel the atrocities of October 7 were justified in the name of 'freedom' for Palestinians. 

Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been playing host and interveners between Israel and Hamas in negotiations for temporary ceasefires when prisoners in Israeli jails can be exchanged for hostages. It is in very fact, Hamas terrorist elites that are giving the orders and calling the shots. All of the commanders of the terrorist groups, in the wake of October 7 made themselves very scarce, going into hiding to preserve their lives, leaving their lower-order operatives to battle with the IDF under their instructions.

Their lives are expendable, those of the civilian population are ultra-disposable, while the commanders shield themselves from repercussions of their wholesale slaughter of Israelis and foreign farm workers on October 7. With pressure on Israel to be 'proportionate', and empathy for the plight of the Palestinians brought upon them by their psychopathic leadership Hamas leaders feel emboldened to dictate acceptable strategic variances from combat for access to humanitarian shipments of aid to the embattled Strip.

 

Armed, masked men reportedly affiliated with Hamas can be seen atop trucks carrying humanitarian aid that arrived in the Gaza Strip via Egypt's Rafah crossing, December 17, 2023. (Screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

 

When agreement is secured to open border crossings, another opportunity is presented to terrorist leaders to slip out of the Gaza Strip in an escape from the punishment meted out by Israel's military. At the same time, while tractor-trailers stuffed with needed food, water, medical supplies, oil and gas are brought in to relieve the crisis for civilians to endure the conflict, the trucks and their humanitarian goods are commandeered by Hamas operatives for their own use, once more depriving the civilian population of access to life-saving food and medicine.

Drone footage

 

Acts of Terror Against Israelis

"[In addition to directing raids during the assault on southern Israel, Khawajiri] secured Hamas terrorist activity in the Shifa Hospital and was in command of Hamas's forces fighting against IDF soldiers in the Shati area."

"He was also responsible for carrying out numerous acts of terror against Israelis."

Israel Defense Forces statement

Representatives from different embassies stand among people fleeing from the Gaza Strip as they arrive in the Egyptian part of the Rafah border crossing with the Palestinian enclave, on Dec. 3, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. AFP via Getty Images

 

Calls were renewed in the Gaza Strip for mass evacuations from the southern town of Khan Younis, as the Israeli military continued to widen its ground offensive, with about 200 Hamas targets being targeted and struck. The IDF has turned its attention from Gaza's north toward the south, following Hamas movements and planning to target the terrorist group's infrastructure and operative presence in the south. The misfortune of displaced Gazan civilians is that having been instructed to leave the north and turn south, they are faced with a similar situation in reverse.

Throughout the Gaza Strip overnight Sunday, into Monday morning Arab and Israeli media reported ongoing attacks, including an operation in the southern Gaza Strip near Rafah and Khan Yunis while Shejaiya in the north long with the Tuffah neighbourhood east of Gaza City also come under attack. Anywhere and everywhere Hamas inserted itself and its weapons depots and rocket launchers among crowded civilian enclaves, there the attention of the IDF swivelled relentlessly.

Israel will not be dissuaded, its resolve to rid itself of the constant lethal menace of Hamas attacks is irreconcilable with any further truces that only serve to enable Hamas to regroup, restock and rest before once again gaining momentum to challenge the IDF's plan for the terror group's complete eradication. Only then will Gaza and the Palestinians who live there be able to eventually reconstruct themselves into a living semblance of civilizational norms and future peace and prosperity. In the meanwhile, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel continues.

In the followup to Hamas's unspeakable sadism in southern Israel on October 7, the response by the Israeli military in its intention to wipe out the terrorist group's functionality and membership has claimed collateral damage familiar in all wars, when civilian populations suffer, but this time with the addition of a population being exploited as a human shield whom Hamas has taught to relish the prospect of martyrdom for the Hamas cause of extirpating Israel and slaughtering Jews.

 

Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images  This picture taken from the southern Gaza Strip shows a rocket fired at Israel and smoke trails on Dec. 3, 2023.

Airstrikes and explosions were heard by nearby residents in and around Khan Yunis following leaflets being dropped by the IDF warning people to relocate further south. Terrorist infrastructure installed in a Beit Hanoun school used to attack Israeli forces was destroyed by the IDF Negev Brigade. In the process two tunnel shafts were discovered within the school complex, one of which included an area for cargo and weaponry.

Shati Battalion commander Haitham Khawajiri, a Hamas commander responsible in the October 7 massacre, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. On Sunday IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi noted that the IDF began its ground offensive in the southern section of the strip, north of the city of Khan Yunis. The military was expanding the ground offensive to "all areas" of the enclave, announced IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

 

Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images   This picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on Dec. 3, 2023, shows smoke billowing over the Palestinian enclave during Israeli bombardment amid continuing battles between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

 

A map dividing southern Gaza into dozens of blocks was published for the purpose of "precise instructions" given to residents where they were best to evacuate to, with the IDF pursuing Hamas with "maximum force" both in the north and south, at the same time attempting to minimize civilian harm. Despite which some among the Palestinians ignored past evacuation orders, asserting they feel no safer elsewhere and plan to remain where they are, taking their chances. As far as Israel is concerned, their targets are the Hamas operatives, not the civilian population; civilian casualties that ensue are the responsibility of a terrorist group that elects deliberately to operate within residential neighbourhoods.

Aside from the warning leaflets dropped over Gaza, phone calls and radio and television broadcasts have also been used as means by which to urge people to leave specified areas due to come under bombardment. During the ceasefire that began on November 24, ending on December 1, a total of 84 Israeli children and women, along with 24 foreign nationals who were abducted were released by Hamas into the care of the International Red Cross, leaving 136 hostages still in the hands of the terrorists.

Palestinians survey the destruction caused by the Israeli bombardment of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

Crimes Against Humanity

"Look at this ceiling. This is not just a regular tunnel. It's more convenient for long living. You have toilets and you have rooms that were built in order to contain people."

"The hospital is providing electricity. They're using the hospital infrastructure in order to provide this terror mechanism to stay alive and survive."

"This blast door allows them to prevent blasts by our air force, meaning it can maintain the preservation of parts of the tunnel."

"Above us, patients, wounded, doctors, all being a human shield for this tunnel system here at Shifa hospital."

"One direction [of a staircase] goes to the Shifa hospital. The other direction goes to different places where the terrorists can move using the safe haven, the human shield of the hospital, the human shield of these regular houses providing them shelter, held by civilians."

"And they choose it in the most barbaric and cynical way. They use it in a room that should have provided teaching for children. This is their choice. This is what we're fighting."

Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman, Israel Defense Forces 

"The director of the Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip was apprehended and transferred for ISA questioning following evidence showing that Shifa Hospital, under his direct management, served as a Hamas command and control centre."

"The Hamas terror tunnel network situated under the hospital also exploited electricity and resources taken from the hospital. In addition, Hamas stored numerous weapons inside the hospital and on the hospital grounds."

"In the hospital, under his [Abu Salmiya's] management, there was extensive Hamas terrorist activity. Findings of his involvement in terrorist activity will determine whether he will be subject to further ISA questioning."

Israel Defense Forces statement

These images released by the IDF on November 21, 2023, show the inside of a Hamas tunnel found under Gaza's Shifa Hospital. (Israel Defense Forces)

 

A video has been released by the Israeli military; its purpose is to visually guide viewers through a Hamas tunnel located under the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The amount of work represented by designing and building a network estimated to be between 250 and 500 kilometres in length is truly astonishing. Even the amenities built into the tunnel system are fairly shocking perhaps simply because it is all so unexpected. On a special guided tour, Rear Admiral Hagari takes journalists through some of the facilities underground.

At one point he reaches up to touch the drop ceiling tiles in one of the rooms off the main passage. "Look at this ceiling!" There are communications conduits and electrical outlets and Hagari explains that power emanates from the building above, the hospital. The tunnel hallways are constructed of concrete with arched ceilings to enable a man to walk through without having to bend his neck or crouch. Such arched tunnels are typical of many of the tunnels built throughout the past 15 years, he explains.

The bare essentials are augmented with handrails on stairs, kitchen countertops, tiles in kitchens and bathrooms, an air conditioning unit in one room. It was, in fact, the air conditioning mechanism on the outside surface that led the IDF investigators to locate the presence of the tunnels below surface. Interior doors are lightweight, but there is also a heavy steel blast door which can withstand invading Israeli troops.

 

Hamas terrorists bring a hostage into Shifa Hospital as seen on surveillance footage from October 7, 2023. (IDF)

 

The video, in fact, had been released on X; the guided tour for journalists enhances and explains what is seen in the video. Yet another video released on X draws viewers outside the hospital to a street located a block away from the hospital. There, an ordinary-appearing apartment hides a tunnel entranceway. Within the bombed-out structure appears what would have been a classroom with a chalkboard covered in English-language lessons.

The floor was lifted in a corner, revealing a short staircase leading to a glass door, and beyond it, a spiral staircase.The director of Al Shifa Hospital was arrested by Israeli forces last Thursday, and with him other several staff members of the hospital, while they were in the process of evacuating south, along the humanitarian corridor.  

A Hamas pickup truck is seen at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, as seen on surveillance footage from October 7, 2023. (IDF)

 

Following their invasion of southern Israel on October 7 -- where terrorists scoured Israeli towns, villages and kibbutzim, killing everyone they saw, mutilating people, torturing them before killing them, tossing bombs into homes, setting homes on fire that burned people's bodies to unidentifiable cores of blackened bones, gang-raping girls and women at the Nova Music Festival nearby the Be'ri Kibbutz, taking 240 infants, elderly, infirm, women, men and soldiers hostage into Gaza -- some of the hostages were taken to the hospital.

Cpl. Noa Marciano

A pathology report verified that one of the hostages, Cpl. Noa Marciano, 19, had been murdered on the premises of the hospital.

"The pathology report states that Noa was injured by an IDF strike, but not in a life-threatening way, and this is contrary to the lies published by Hamas according to which Noa was killed by IDF strikes", explained Rear Admiral Hagari. "According to intelligence information, Noa was taken inside the walls of Shifa Hospital, where she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist."

 

"On November 2, Dr. Michael Ryan, director of WHO health emergencies program, said he knew what was going on ‘above ground’ at Shifa and was aware that the use of medical facilities for military purposes is forbidden according to international law. At the same time, he claimed he doubted that any terror activities were happening at Shifa."

"It is clear now that WHO has ignored the use of medical facilities as human shields and of Hamas’s refusal to allow civilians to evacuate from them… WHO’s failure to address these issues amounts to its contribution to the continuation of a conflict that is causing much suffering to so many."

Israeli Health Minister Uriel Busso and Health Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov.

An IDF infographic showing where the bodies of Israeli hostages Yehudit Weiss and Noa Marciano were found near the Shifa Hospital complex. (IDF)

 

 

Hamas Mass Butchery

"Those who wish to 'contextualize' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a way to dismiss Hamas's brutality prove they do not care about actual suffering. They are more interested in seeing the whole world through a Marxist lens, where there is always an oppressor and an oppressed, and where one group's good fortune can only come through the exploitation of another group."

"Hamas did not attack Israel because of an occupation in Gaza, an occupation that ended in 2005, or because of the years-long blockade against the territory, which Egypt has also enforced. Hamas attacked because it wants to eradicate Israel from the map, and because of its twisted desire to murder Jewish people."

"In practice, a humanitarian pause would be just another way to punish Jews and give comfort to Israel's terrorist enemies. In Gaza, Hamas would be free to continue putting rocket launchers next to schools, using hospitals and residential buildings as military planning bases and stealing aid to fund and support terrorist  attacks. Its own citizens would continue to be deliberately sacrificed for the sole purpose of blaming Israel for their deaths in order to turn international opinion against the Jewish state."

"A so-called humanitarian pause makes this outcome all the more likely. It would give Hamas time to regroup, refuel and refortify, not to mention providing easier access to weapons and other supplies from Iran, its backer. Pausing fighting could also be deadly for Israelis. Retired Canadian General Rick Hillier [said] a pause could result in the deaths of hundreds of soldiers."

Carson Jerema, Journalist, National Post

Israeli soldiers remove the body of a civilian killed in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the border with Gaza. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images

 

The mind freezes at the appalling brutality and sheer inhumanity of the terrorist attacks that took place in southern Israel at the Gaza border on October 7. The scale of the barbarity, the enjoyment evidenced by the Hamas operatives, their glee in videoing their atrocities, their boastful shout-outs to their companions is breathtaking in the scale of vicious inhumanity portrayed by the terror group. Yet they were assured enough of support from the Arab and Muslim world, particularly that part of the Umma residing in the West, that they proudly circulated the videos on social media.

 

Israeli soldiers stand by an engine from a hang glider that Palestinian terrorists used a few days earlier in an attack on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza, in Kfar Gaza, Israel, Oct. 10, 2023.  Amir Levy/Getty Images

One video begins with Hamas members camped out along highways relentlessly firing straight at all vehicles driving within reach of their guns, to kill drivers and vehicle occupants. The vehicles, ending up in roadside ditches, are double-checked for anyone still alive, to ensure that additional bullets would take them out of their misery and from life's existence; another notch in the death toll. 

Another video documents terrorists waiting at a gate into a kibbutz where two men are in hiding, emerging only when a car approaches and the gate opens, when they ambush the vehicle  and the driver and passenger are left in pools of blood while a flood of terrorists enter to begin their butchery of the kibbutz residents; children, their parents, grandparents, and the mass rape of girls and women, before some are taken hostage into Gaza, while the village is ransacked.

Hamas members are shown via body-cam footage going house-to-house, firing through windows, ringing doorbells, bursting through doors, setting homes on fire and shooting dogs to death. Grenades are tossed into houses, killing families. These are viral scenes of rabid berserkers intoxicated with death, enjoying the carnage they're perpetrating on innocent civilians; guilty by virtue of the inescapable fact that they're Jews.

 

Israeli soldiers stand next to the bodies of Israelis killed by Hamas terrorists in kibbutz Kfar Azza.   Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

The terrorists in this well-planned and -executed mass atrocity are armed with grenades and AK-47s, but also with cellphones and body cameras, and big smiles, cheerfully taking pictures for posterity of the scenes they are responsible for having created, bodies strewn everywhere about them, littering the ground soaked with the victims' blood.

And then there are recordings of the victorious return of the terrorists into Gaza, to a heroes' welcome, dragging with them young women, beaten and raped, half-clothed, viewed lying battered and comatose on the backs of trucks. When Israel collated the videos and produced a longer version of their own for instructive purposes, and exposed the footage to the international press, some of the best-known news sites distinguished themselves by writing up the event, while carefully avoiding using the word 'terrorists'.

Even before Hamas had completed its day of slaughter, there were 'protesters' out in public proclaiming their pride in Palestinian 'resistance', celebrating Hamas's victory over the 'occupier'. And before Israel had the opportunity to begin responding to this horrendous act of war, the nattering began over its 'disproportionate' response, not one shot yet fired back in defence against the terrorists. In Ireland, its premier suggested that Israel's response amounted to 'collective punishment'; the campaign in Gaza, said its foreign minister "disproportionate by any measure".

The Israel Defense Forces placed countless calls, sent out text messages, dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets on Gaza warning civilians to evacuate areas being targeted. Awkward to say the least, considering that Hamas built tunnels purposely along with subterranean bases underneath hospitals, schools and mosques, placing rocket launchers next to apartment blocks and playgrounds. And as Israel responds, Hamas has instructed its people not to evacuate, despite the warning from Israel.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Israel, where Hamas terrorists attacked, and killed scores of people.

ABC News

Israel in Gaza Progress Report

Image: Planet Labs

"Southern Command stations, commander is speaking."

"We are launching an attack on Hamas and the terror groups in the Gaza Strip."

"Our goal is one: victory. No matter  how long the fighting takes, how difficult, there is no other result but victory."

Maj.Gen. Yaron Finkelman, head, IDF Southern Command

Over 300 Hamas targets were struck in the past 24 hours by the Israel Defense Forces. "Numerous" terrorists were killed, including a senior commander, Nasim Abu Ajina who was commander of the Beit Lahia Battalion of Hamas's Northern Brigade. He was killed in an airstrike on Monday.

 

Abu Ajina directed the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians in both Kibbutz Erez and Netiv Ha'asara. "His elimination significantly harms the efforts of the Hamas terrorist organization to disrupt the IDF's ground activities", stated the Israeli military.

 

As well as providing real time direction for IAF airstrikes on Hamas forces and infrastructure, Israeli ground forces engaged and destroyed terrorist cells, conducting "fierce battles" against Hamas "deep in the Gaza Strip" in recent hours, announced the IDF on Tuesday. 

Rocket fire from Gaza continued irrespective of the presence of IDF ground forces in Gaza, triggering sirens in Israeli border communities overnight Monday multiple times and on Tuesday morning. Central Israel saw rocket barrages fired at them on Tuesday afternoon. 

IDF fighter jets struck multiple Hezbollah targets on the northern frontier in Lebanon Monday overnight, engaging with terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank since Israel's declaration of total war on Hamas as a consequence of the savage terror attack on October 7 in the western Negev with its death toll of 1,400 Israelis, where over 5,000 others were wounded and over 200 taken as hostages into Gaza.

U.S. forces stationed in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Iranian terror proxies, with 24 drone and rocket attacks occurring in recent days. Voice of America reported three attacks on Monday alone, citing US. defence officials.  At a base near al-Shaddadi in northeastern Syria, U.S. forces were attacked Sunday with no fatalities reported, but dozens reportedly injured.

"We know that these are Iranian-backed militia groups that are supported by Iran and, of course, we hold Iran responsible for these groups", stated Pentagon press secretary Brig.Gen. Pat Ryder, last week.

Three Israeli citizens, residents of Sakhnin and Arraba in the Galilee, affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group, were arrested in a joint Israel Security Agency and Israel Police operation, suspected of preparing to carry out terror-related activities while the war in Gaza is ongoing.

Image: Planet Labs