Israel declares victory over Hamas’ Rafah brigade

Israeli soldiers operating in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, July 22, 2024. Photo by Oren Cohen/Flash90.

(JNS) — The Israel Defense Forces has defeated Hamas’s Rafah brigade, the military declared on Sept. 12 after four months of targeted raids in the area of the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city near the border with Egypt.

Since the start of the Rafah operation on May 6, troops have killed more than 2,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and destroyed some eight miles of underground smuggling and attack routes, according to an Israeli army statement.

“During these operations, the troops have dismantled the Rafah brigade of the Hamas terrorist organization,” the military formally declared.

In recent weeks, the IDF’s Nahal Brigade, Givati Brigade, 401st Brigade, Yahalom combat engineering unit and Shayetet 13 naval commando unit have been operating in Tel al-Sultan, western Rafah, the IDF said.

In “intelligence-based targeted” operations, troops killed more than 250 terrorists, including the commander of Hamas’s Tel al-Sultan Battalion, Mahmoud Hamdan, and most of the battalion’s chain of command.

Troops destroyed some 80 percent of tunnels located near and beneath the Philadelphi Corridor, the army statement noted, using the IDF’s name for the 8.5-mile-long land strip along the border with Egypt. It added that forces continue to discover and destroy underground routes.

Speaking with reporters on Sept. 12, 162nd Division commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen declared that “four battalions have been destroyed, and we have completed operational control over the entire urban area.”

The Rafah brigade and its four battalions — Yabna (south), east Rafah, Tel al-Sultan (west) and Shaboura (north) — was the terror group’s final functioning brigade, according to past Israel military assessments.

On Aug. 21, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a visit to Gaza first declared that the IDF had achieved victory over the Rafah brigade.

“I came here first and foremost to express my appreciation [to the soldiers]. The IDF’s 162nd Division defeated the Rafah brigade,” the defense minister stated following a tour of the Philadelphi Corridor.

At the time, the IDF had located and destroyed around 150 tunnels, and after Gallant ordered the destruction of the remaining smuggling routes, some 50 more were blown up by the forces, Cohen said.

“Most of them we have destroyed,” the Israeli general told journalists, adding: “We are operating at the other sites to investigate them, and when we finish investigating, they will be destroyed.”

The Rafah operation resulted in a great deal of friction with Washington. In addition to some 3,000 terrorists, more than a million Gazans sought shelter in the southernmost city earlier this year when the IDF fighting was concentrated in the northern and then central sections of the coastal enclave. Once Rafah was slated to be the new operations area, concerns focused on potential harm to the congested civilian population, so the determination was made to evacuate them.

Within a fortnight after the start of the operation in Rafah, around 950,000 civilians were moved from the city to humanitarian zones.

Netanyahu repeatedly emphasized that telling Jerusalem not to operate in Rafah is equivalent to demanding that it lose the war, warning in March that Hamas could “regroup, rearm and reconquer Gaza.”

On Aug. 31, the bodies of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Almog Sarusi, 25, Alexander Lobanov, 32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Master Sgt. Ori Danino, 25, were found in a Rafah tunnel.

As many as three-quarters of Jewish Israelis and a majority of Israelis overall supported expanding the military operations to Rafah, according to a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute in March.