The IDF said on Monday that it had killed dozens more of Hamas terrorists in Jabalya only a day after it said that the terror group was nearly cleared out of the northern Gaza area.
According to the military, locating and killing the Hamas forces was made possible by a mix of ongoing intelligence collection, operations to trick the forces into an ambush, and both tank fire and soldiers' nearby gunfire.
To date, the IDF has invaded Jabalya in fall 2023, again in May of this year, and again in October of this year.
By December 2023, the IDF declared Jabalya under operational control and Hamas's battalions broken.
After the May invasion, the IDF said it had destroyed 12 kilometers of Hamas tunnels and killed between 300-500 terrorists, leaving the area relatively clear of Hamas.
After several weeks of operations in Jabalya starting from this October, the IDF again said that most of the terrorists there were cleared.
That was until Friday and Sunday, when the IDF said that it had killed dozens more terrorists and arrested around 204 more terrorists.
At that point, the IDF again said that Jabalya was essentially cleared.
Progress against Hamas
However, Monday's announcement of the IDF having killed dozens more Hamas forces, while a positive tactical sign for progress against Hamas, suggested that IDF intelligence is consistently wrong about how many Hamas forces remain in a given area like Jabalya.
Part of the reason for this could be the large number of Palestinian terrorists who fake being unarmed civilians most of the time.
Another reason could be that Hamas continues to successfully find new recruits among adolescent and minor Palestinians, who have very little to do with their time, and an unprecedented number of whom have had family and friends killed by the IDF during this war.
The IDF also believes and hopes that the recent rocket fire from northern Gaza has been Hamas rushing to clear out its last inventory of rockets from the area before the military bears down on them, but to date, the IDF has not been able to fully stop rocket fire from Gaza.
This failure to clear out all of the terrorists even out of one area of the northern half of northern Gaza (without even attempting to fully do so in all of northern Gaza or the rest of Gaza) could be one reason why IDF sources on Sunday were more forthright about admitting that - if ordered - it will prolong keeping Jabalya cut-off from Gaza City.
While both Jabalya and Gaza City are broadly part of northern Gaza, Jabalya, along with Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, are part of the northernmost half of northern Gaza, which have been progressively emptied of most Palestinian terrorists and civilians alike since early October.
In early October, the IDF evacuated tens of thousands of Palestinians to Gaza City and further South, while large numbers of Hamas terrorists were also killed.
Both due to global criticism and having exhausted the main Hamas areas to attack at the time, the IDF then returned to smaller scale mopping up operations of smaller terror cells for much of the last two months.
All of this has come as there is an ongoing debate about whether Israel is implementing a plan known as “the General’s Plan,” proposed by a number of senior former IDF officials, to empty all of northern Gaza of Palestinians and cut it off completely as a pressure move against Hamas.
The Biden administration and European allies loudly opposed the plan and Israel has denied it adopted the plan, but in practice seems to have been half-implementing it in parts of northern Gaza, while allowing some Palestinian to remain in Gaza City.
However on Friday, the IDF, in coordination with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), broke this pattern arresting over 240 terrorists in a targeted operation against Hamas's latest attempt to reconstitute itself in northern gaza, largely embedded within the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya.