Sgt. First Class Tal Lahat, 21, was among those who rescued Nahal Oz residents on Oct. 7; military says dozens of gunmen killed in Shejaiya, tunnels destroyed in Rafah
An Israeli soldier was killed during fighting in Gaza City, the military announced Wednesday morning, raising Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against terror group Hamas and military operations along the border with the Strip to 327.
Sgt. First Class Tal Lahat, 21, of the Maglan commando unit, was killed on Tuesday afternoon, in a Hamas-claimed sniper attack in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City.
The Israel Defense Forces in a morning update said troops, including Maglan, had raided UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City — located near the Rimal and Tel al-Hawa neighborhoods — which the military said had been used by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to carry out attacks against troops.
The raid was carried out by the Commando Brigade and elite Multi-Domain Unit, which had on Tuesday joined the IDF’s 99th Division in a new operation in southern and western areas of Gaza City.
The IDF said it first opened a humanitarian corridor for civilians to leave the UNRWA facility area.
During the raid against the UN site, troops killed and detained several gunmen and located a large amount of weapons, according to the IDF.
On Monday, the Israeli military launched the new operation in Gaza City. It said at the time that it was operating in the area of the UNRWA headquarters, where the IDF previously found significant Hamas tunnel infrastructure and killed and captured numerous gunmen.
The IDF was pursuing Palestinian terror operatives in Gaza City, six months after it said it had dismantled Hamas’s “military framework” in the territory’s north.
Large parts of Gaza City and urban areas around it have been flattened or left a shattered landscape after nine months of fighting. Much of the population fled earlier in the war, but around 200,000 Palestinians remain in the north, according to IDF assessments.
“The fighting has been intense,” said Hakeem Abdel-Bar, who fled Gaza City’s Tuffah district to the home of relatives in another part of the city. He claimed Israeli warplanes and drones were “striking anything moving” and that tanks had moved into central districts.
Hamas’s military wing on Tuesday, described the latest fighting in Gaza City as “the most intense in months.”
The UN said tens of thousands of civilians have been affected by the surge in fighting since the first of three evacuation orders for Gaza City was declared on June 27.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, UNRWA, said that “we have around 350,000 people again on the road,” but “basically, there is absolutely no safe space in Gaza.”
The slain soldier, Lahat, from Kfar Saba, was to be laid to rest on Wednesday evening.
Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon identified Lahat as one of a group of soldiers who came to Kibbutz Nahal Oz to save residents from terrorists who had overrun the border community on October 7.
“His team arrived in my neighborhood and took us out of the secure rooms after long hours of being in mortal danger, and stayed with us until the organized evacuation of the community at night,” Tibon wrote in a post on social media platform X.
On October 7, Palestinian terror group Hamas led a massive cross-border assault on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, amid numerous atrocities. The 3,000 terrorists who burst into the south of the country also abducted 251 people of all ages who were taken as hostages to Gaza.
From the early morning, gunmen rampaged murderously through southern Israel areas, overrunning towns, communities and military posts while slaughtering those they found. Terrorists invaded Nahal Oz and an adjacent military base, killing over 60 soldiers and 12 residents of the kibbutz. During the battle to retake control of the kibbutz, in which Lahat participated, three Maglan soldiers were killed. Tibon and his family, who took refuge in the home’s secure room, were saved by the soldiers and by others who included his own father, retired army general Noam Tibon, who had rushed to the kibbutz to rescue his son.
Also in the past day, the IDF said troops with the 98th Division killed dozens of gunmen in Gaza City’s eastern Shejaiya neighborhood, amid a separate operation there.
A tunnel was also demolished in Shejaiya, the military said. On Tuesday, the IDF announced it had demolished at least six tunnels in Shejaiya, and that several more were being investigated.
The IDF has been operating in Shejaiya for the past two weeks.
Meanwhile, operations also continued in southern Gaza’s Rafah, where the IDF said troops with the 162nd Division killed several terror operatives, located weapons, and destroyed tunnels in the past day. The offensive in Rafah began in early May.
Separately, several drone strikes were carried out against Hamas operatives in the central Gaza Strip, who according to the IDF were involved in digging tunnels and launching missiles at troops in Gaza.
Israel responded to the Hamas October 7 attack with a military offensive to destroy the terror group, topple its Gaza regime, and free the 120 remaining hostages in Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
As reported by The Times of Israel