TEL AVIV – On Tuesday, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the military is expanding operations in southern and central Gaza as it is close to dismantling all of Hamas’s battalions in the northern part of the Strip, but warns that the war will last “many more months.”
اضافة اعلان
“I just left the Gaza Strip, I met the troops in the north of the Strip. I was impressed by the way the forces are fighting, working, and achieving the goals we set for them. The [IOF] is close to completing the dismantling of the Hamas battalions in the northern Gaza Strip,” said Halevi in a press conference in southern Israel.
“We eliminated many [resistance fighters] and commanders, some of them surrendered to our forces and we took hundreds of prisoners. We destroyed many underground infrastructures and weapons,” he added.
But Halevi warned that in “this dense urban area, where Hamas are dressed as civilians, it cannot be said that we killed all of them.”
“We will likely still meet [Hamas] fighters in this area, and we will continue to attack them and pursue them in a variety of ways,” he said of the fighting in northern Gaza, which is expected to shift into a lower gear once the last Hamas battalion is dismantled.
“Now, we are concentrating our efforts in the south of the Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, the central camps, and beyond. And we will continue to both preserve and deepen the achievement in the north of the Gaza Strip,” Halevi added.
He says the army “will not allow a return to the security reality before October 7, and we will not allow such an event to be repeated.”
“The Air Force continues to strike non-stop. A building falls when it is an enemy target, a building falls when it poses a danger to our forces,” Halevi said.
More than 20,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of whom women and children have been killed by Israel bombing. More than 50,000 have been injured. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, according to UN agencies.
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