Hamas kills dozens of IDF soldiers as ceasefire deal looms

The Palestinian resistance has been exacting huge costs on the Israelis for their attempted occupation of northern Gaza.

The Palestinian resistance factions have been exacting huge costs on the Israelis over the past couple of weeks for their genocide and attempted occupation of northern Gaza, killing dozens of the Israeli terrorists and wounding many more.

Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, released an update on Monday night, announcing an operation that led to the “killing and wounding” of 25 Israelis in Rafah city in southern Gaza. The leading Palestinian faction added that its fighters then attacked the Israeli troop carriers that came to rescue the casualties from the initial raid.

“In a complex operation, our fighters managed to raid a building where a Zionist infantry force of 25 soldiers was fortified, and dealt with them with various types of weapons, killing and wounding all members of the force,” Al-Qassam reported on Monday. “Immediately after the rescue force arrived, a minefield was detonated against two troop carriers. A fire is still burning in the building, and the clash is ongoing in the Al-Najili area of Al-Shaboura camp, central Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip.”

While this operation took place in southern Gaza, resistance operations in northern Gaza have been especially fierce. Despite carpet bombing northern Gaza for over 100 days and destroying nearly every building in the top half of the enclave, the Israelis have failed to diminish the intensity of the indigenous resistance. Israeli media has reported over a dozen deaths among its personnel over the last few days. In terms of the sheer number of casualties, January has been the most devastating month for the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza since October 7.

With the documented Israeli habit of hiding its true casualty figures, it is fair to estimate that the actual number of dead and wounded is far higher than the Israeli reports suggest.

Abu Obeida, the Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman, gave an update on the damage the resistance is inflicting on the invaders.

“After more than 100 days of the comprehensive destruction and genocide carried out by the enemy army in the northern Gaza Strip, our fighters continue to inflict heavy losses on it and deal it harsh blows that have left more than 10 dead and dozens injured in the last 72 hours,” Abu Obeida wrote on his Telegram account on Monday.

He further added that Israel’s casualty count is vastly underreported and that the genocidal occupation will be defeated from the north of the Gaza Strip from where it will run away, “dragging its tails of shame.” Abu Obeida wrote, “We confirm that the losses in the ranks of the failed occupation army are much more than what it announces, and the enemy will be defeated from the northern Gaza Strip, disappointed, dragging its tails of shame without being able to break the back of the resistance, and the only achievement it has achieved is destruction, devastation and massacres against innocent people.”

Al-Quds Brigades — the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the second largest resistance faction in Gaza after Hamas — reported its own successful operation in Beit Hanoun on Monday: “After restoring contact with our fighters inside the enemy combat zones in northern Gaza, they reported that they had blown up a military vehicle with a pre-planted explosive device in Beit Hanoun, killing and wounding its crew.”

The five Israeli terrorists who were killed in Beit Hanoun on Monday.

That same day, the Zionist military reported another deadly event in Beit Hanoun that killed five IDF thugs and wounded another ten. All the dead were part of the Nahal Brigade’s Reconnaissance Unit. The genocidal military has, however, insinuated that the deaths were a result of an accident and not due to the Palestinian resistance. “They were inside a building and preparing to use explosives for engineering activity when the explosives detonated,” The Times of Israel reported. “As a result of the blast, the building the troops were in collapsed, killing the five soldiers.”

The Israeli military has a long history of not only concealing troop deaths, but also attributing resistance kills to friendly fires and accidents.

The resistance has been extremely fierce and deadly for the Israelis in Beit Hanoun in the north of the enclave. On January 11, Resistance News Network reported two operations — one in Beit Hanoun and the other in Rafah in the south — that accounted for the deaths of seven Israeli terrorists, while 23 were wounded, 11 of them critically:

Footage of wounded and killed soldiers being evacuated from Gaza has begun to pour in following numerous painful blows from the Palestinian resistance against the IOF.

In one incident, earlier today, resistance fighters targeted an officer’s vehicle in Beit Hanoun with an anti-armor shell, gunfire, and explosive devices. The ambush, executed in two stages, killed at least five soldiers.

In another incident, a rigged tunnel opening was detonated in Rafah, killing two soldiers.

According to settler reports, a total of seven IOF soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip today and at least 23 wounded, with 11 being critically injured.

Footage from the day showed helicopter evacuations of dead and wounded Israeli troops:

The Israeli military reported four deaths and six wounded — two critically — in the resistance operations in Beit Hanoun on January 11.

On January 9, the The Zionist military admitted to the deaths of two soldiers and one officer following a resistance ambush in Beit Hanoun. Another officer was reported to be seriously wounded.

In the northern Gaza Strip, all hospitals have been put out of service, civil defence barely functions due to a lack of fuel, vehicles, and continuous targeting of its personnel, barely any aid is allowed in, and bombs continue to rain round the clock on the plastic tents of the Palestinians. Despite these punishing conditions and surviving on animal feed and leaves, thousands of Palestinians refuse to leave the rubbles of their homes for the south while the resistance continues to foil all plans of a long-term Israeli occupation and the eventual construction of Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian lands.

RNN reported from Israeli media that the Zionist troops have been left confounded with by raging resistance in the north despite scorching the area and imposing a deadly cease on it since early October 2024:

Following the successive resistance strikes in Beit Hanoun, reports of demoralized Zionist soldiers have begun to emerge: Correspondents for the Zionist-run Channel 12 reported on soldiers’ insistence that “Hamas’s underground network is fully operational” in the wake of deadly ambushes which kill soldiers in so-called “secure zones.”

The IOF itself has reportedly demanded that its officers devise a new strategy before continuing to operate in Beit Hanoun. Unconfirmed reports claim that resistance officers in the field, after laying their ambushes, baited the Zionist army into a hasty invasion of the city by repeatedly firing rockets towards the northern Gaza Envelope.

Israeli media tried to make sense of Hamas’s preparedness in dealing with the Israeli troops (who reinvaded Beit Hanoun two weeks ago) and Maariv came up with the following conclusion on January 12:

The terrorists [read Palestinian freedom fighters] waited and prepared for the IDF to return to the scene: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cameras placed in various areas monitoring the movement of IDF forces, hundreds of booby-trapped houses, traffic routes with booby-trapped and side-loaded bombs, shelters where terrorists hide and prepare to fire anti-tank missiles and sniper fire at the forces.

The paper added that the genocidal forces will change its methods to counter the resistance, “Yesterday’s incident [January 11], in which four Nahal Brigade fighters were killed and six were injured, two of them seriously, led the Gaza Division to conduct a rapid investigation and change the method of work and movement of the forces in the combat zone.”

Another Israeli outlet lamented that the January 11 ambush occurred in an area that was “under full operational control, after being cleared” by the genocidal Israeli troops. Maariv continued to repeat the old canard that “The goal of the forces is to destroy the last Hamas battalion in the northern Gaza Strip.”

By now the Israelis have undertaken over a dozen missions to destroy “the last Hamas battalion.” Back in May 2024, when they invaded Rafah, it was on the pretext of “eliminating the last remaining Hamas battalions” in the south after destroying them in the north. Yet, the Israelis haven’t been able to exercise control in any part of Gaza, laying bare the lies of their morally bankrupt, genocidal leadership.

Wherever the Israeli troops go, they encounter fierce resistance and are left counting losses and deteriorating troop morale as a consequence of sending them to the same areas over and over again.

Back in October 2024, Israeli outlet Ha-Makom reported on the futility of the Israeli exercise which was wearing down its soldiers, who had nothing to show for their genocidal efforts. One soldier’s mother told the Hebrew outlet, “They keep going back to the same buildings they’ve already cleared, only to find them booby-trapped again. In the Zeitoun neighbourhood alone, they’ve been there three times. They understand it’s pointless.” Another parent told the paper, “When they had to return to places we’d already been, like Jabalia, Zeitoun, and Shuja’iyya, it broke them.” While one soldier told the paper, “We’re sitting ducks in a shooting range. We don’t understand what we’re doing here...The hostages aren’t coming back, and it just feels never-ending — soldiers are getting injured and dying along the way. It all seems pointless.”

The Ha-Makom report ended with a telling quote from one soldier, “If the treatment doesn’t improve soon, the little wind left in our sails will also disappear.”

In the four months since that report the conditions of the Israelis in Gaza have only deteriorated as they took a severe beating at the hands of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and have failed to douse the undying flame of resistance in Gaza.

The Palestinian resistance, however, has continued to go from strength to strength, regrouping and integrating new fighters. The unexploded bombs of the Israelis and the weapons taken from the dead Zionists will ensure that the Palestinian resistance won’t be running out of firepower for years to come.

In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the Israelis finally appear ready for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange — offers that have been on the table from October 8, 2023 — with the Palestinians.

The complete defeat of Hamas, as Netanyahu and his fellow band of genocidaires in Israel and western capitals outlined at the beginning of their genocidal campaign in October 2023, will remain a chimera despite the killing of over 300,000 innocent Palestinians in the most brutal of ways imaginable.

The resistance lives and it will have the last word.

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