For the past three weeks, the Israel Defense Forces’ 7th Armored Brigade combat team has been fighting on the outskirts of Gaza City to defeat Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion.
If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the troops should have an easy time of it — after all, they’ve done this before. This is the seventh time Israeli forces have attacked the neighborhood since the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.
Only weeks after the Hamas invasion, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office released footage of the 36th Division fighting “to defeat the Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion, one of the organization’s main battalions.”
“The 50th Battalion of the Nahal Brigade defeated the Zeitoun Battalion in the heart of Gaza City,” read (Hebrew link) a subsequent article in February 2024.
“There are terrorists here and even when we leave, there will be terrorists, but they will be few. Their ability to create command and control is very low,” the IDF battalion commander said at the time.
If those previous efforts had been as successful as some claimed, Israeli troops wouldn’t need to keep coming back.
Read the full article at the Times of Israel.
