The IDF on Tuesday said that if need be, it will reinvade Shejaia in northern Gaza even a third time as it nears the end of its second invasion of the area.
Further, the IDF said that anywhere that Hamas tries to reconstitute either its military or political organizations and governance, the military will return a potentially unlimited number of times to break up such attempted comebacks.
The IDF first invaded Shejaia in the mid-fall, had operational control of Shejaia by early January, and then its 98th Division invaded again on June 27.
According to the IDF, the second invasion is close to completion, having killed around 150 Hamas terrorists and destroyed between six to nine significant tunnels, including a large new command and control tunnel of 2.5 km.
Primarily, the goals of this second invasion were to cut off any Hamas reestablishment of command and control coordination as well as to eliminate key tunnels it was using to maneuver beneath IDF aerial detection to set up its ambushes of IDF forces.
Some of the tunnels that the IDF destroyed came up to the Israeli border fence or dangerously close to that point.
Moreover, IDF forces checked the effectiveness of air force bombing tunnels to map out which tunnels such attacks had destroyed and which tunnels needed additional attention from engineering units to finish the job.
In December 2023, the IDF brought The Jerusalem Post and some other media outlets for a special visit to Military Intelligence’s office for collecting items seized from Hamas for inspecting, cataloging, and translating into operational intelligence.
Already just in two months at that point, the office of around 350 personnel, the majority reservists, had sorted through over 65 million electronic files and 500,000 physical documents with the current rate of new incoming electronic files reaching the region of one million per day.
Using the IDF intelligence catalog office’s conclusions, there had been a huge number of instances where soldiers in the field were saved from Hamas ambushes.
For example, physical maps and electronic files had revealed to the IDF many of the places where Hamas had concealed tunnel shafts and spots for sharpshooters setup for ambushes. Presumably, these activities have continued to this day.
IDF sources did not share any breakthroughs in intelligence relating to the remaining 120 or so hostages, of which 50-70 are estimated, according to a variety of Post sources, to be still alive.
While a few Hamas fighters stood and fought against the IDF invasion in an organized way, many of them were killed while trying to set up ambushes by using mortars, drones, or other attack items.
The IDF emphasized that a decisive and absolute victory over a terror group, as opposed to a country and standard armed forces, would not necessarily have a set point and was more part of an ongoing process of wearing down Hamas’s ability to try to mount comebacks.
In an update from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry on Tuesday, it was announced that the death toll in Gaza has reached 38,243 since the war started.
A further 88,033 have been wounded in the conflict, the ministry added.
The number has not been independently verified, and the ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its toll, with the IDF saying that at least 16,000 of those killed were Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists.
The Hamas-run ministry has also been repeatedly criticized for distorting casualty figures, with parts of the UN significantly revising their reliance on their numbers in recent months.
In May, departing from Hamas’s reported figures, the UN halved the number of women and children it had previously reported had been killed thus far in the war.
Besides Shejaia, the IDF reinvasion of Gaza City, which started on Monday, has led to killing dozens of Hamas fighters.
To the south, in Rafah, soldiers continued operational activity, killing dozens of additional terrorists in both close-quarters combat and via Israel Air Force airstrikes, the military added.
Later, in the early afternoon, rocket sirens blared in the border communities of Avshalom, Yevul, and Yated.
The three southern communities are located near the southern portion of the Strip, near the Egyptian border.
Shortly after that, the IDF reported that the military’s Aerial Defense Array intercepted a projectile that had crossed into Israeli territory from Rafah.
No injuries were reported as a result of the attack.
In the North, the IDF said Hezbollah had fired over 40 rockets into the Golan.
A vague IDF statement seemed to indicate that it allowed many of the rockets to land in uninhabited areas.
Also, the IDF’s air defense intercepted two of Hezbollah’s explosive drones before they crossed into Israeli territory from Lebanon, the IDF announced on Tuesday afternoon.
Late Tuesday, Magen David Adom reported that two Israelis were wounded by Hezbollah’s attacks or by fires caused by the attacks.
Responding, the IDF conducted airstrikes against Hezbollah in Kafr Kilah.
Separately, an alleged Israeli strike hit a vehicle in Syrian territory on the Damascus-Beirut highway, killing one of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s former bodyguards, who security sources said was lately involved in transporting weapons for the terror group.
Hezbollah issued a statement mourning Yasser Nimr Qarbash without elaborating on his role in the organization.
Two security sources said the former bodyguard had become a mid-ranking Hezbollah official involved in the transport of weapons.
Multiple sources refused to comment on the report to the Post.
Jerusalem Post Staff and Reuters contributed to this report.