Hamas reveals the latest 'Gates of Hell' footage as Israel admits killing 82% civilians in Gaza

“By God, that blast is unreal. The whole area is burning — burning, burning, burning — flames everywhere!”

Al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas, on Wednesday published the third part of its Gates of Hell ambush operations in southern Gaza. (You can watch Gates of Hell - Part 1 here and Gates of Hell - Part 2 here.)

The video captures action from May 8 in the Tannour neighbourhood, east of Rafah, and starts with a brief recap of the first two operations in the series.

The Qassam video explains the two operations shown in the footage as follows:

• The first operation began by targeting an engineering unit inside one of the houses, preparing to demolish it, using several anti-personnel and anti-armour shells.

• The second operation began by targeting an Israeli infantry force with a powerful explosive device, leaving them dead and wounded.

The first operation is another one of those Qassam fighters’ karmic justice attacks, when Israeli terrorists preparing their trademark wanton destruction of civilian houses are pushed through the Gates of Hell instead.

In the May 8 ground report for the Gates of Hell - Part 3 operation, Al-Qassam had revealed that its “fighters observed the scattered remains of a number of occupation soldiers in the area.” The brutal footage of the second operation shows five Israelis walking straight to the site where the explosives were planted and “the scattered remains” part of the ground report starts to make sense. A couple of soldiers can be seen writhing on the floor once the explosives go off.

Here is the Gates of Hell - Part 3 footage as released by Al-Qassam:

The conversations between its fighters reveal that Al-Qassam wasn’t sure about the total number of Israeli terrorists they blew up in the first operation, as one fighter is heard saying, “There, there… about six, maybe seven. O Lord, I’m not sure — seven?”

Here is the conversation during the first operation, starting at the 1:36 mark in the video:

“O Lord, O Lord. Grant us Your favor.”

“Here’s a soldier moving underneath the house. There they are; they’ll be in the storehouse—there, they entered the storehouse. They’ll enter the other street—there, there… about six, maybe seven. O Lord, I’m not sure — seven?”

“Do six or seven show? Yeah.”

“I see them. Explode them.”

“Alright, hit them — seventy shots, quickly, one after another, one after another. Open fire on them — there, there! They’ve all come out of the street.”

“Allah is greatest! By God, he blew them up.”

“Blow up the second one quickly — move to the second!”

“He blew up the second.”

“By God, that blast is unreal. The whole area is burning — burning, burning, burning — flames everywhere!”

After executing the second operation, one fighter exclaims, “And the Rafah Brigade will remain a hell for the invaders.”

Indeed, Rafah remains “a hell for the invaders,” with their every move watched, every incursion noted, and advanced preparations underway to send them back to their genocidal state in body bags — as these three Gates of Hell operations and other operations in the area have shown. It is no surprise, then, that nearly half of the Israeli reservists are shirking the call of duty to kill Palestinian babies and their mothers, and are choosing to stay home rather than don the genocidal uniforms of their depraved military.

Towards the end of the video, Al-Qassam shows shots of Sergeant Yishai Elyakim Urbach from the Engineering Battalion 605, Barak Unit (188), and Sergeant Yam Frid, a soldier from the Golani Brigade, whose killings were reported by the Israeli press.

While the battlefield continues to reveal mounting losses, the public narrative in Israel remains tightly controlled. Despite calling itself the sole bastion of democracy in the Middle East, Israel has one of the most censored media apparatuses anywhere in the world. No news about its military operations is published in any Israeli outlet before it is cleared by the defence establishment. As a result, the true numbers of Israeli casualties during its ground invasion of Gaza are hard to ascertain. But one thing is for sure, the official tally of under 500 combat deaths bears no resemblance to the ground reality.

There is no contesting the number of Palestinian civilians the Israelis have been slaughtering over the last 19 months in Gaza, however. The official death tally released by the health ministry in Gaza has crossed 53,000. Gaza officials only count the dead who pass through its hospitals. There’s no accounting for the dead who are buried before being taken to a hospital, those who remain buried in the rubble of their homes, or those devoured by hungry dogs on the streets and roads of Gaza. A peer-reviewed Lancet paper earlier this year estimated that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the ongoing genocidal war was about 40 percent higher than numbers recorded by the health ministry. As the Israelis have ravenously devoured the health ministry infrastructure in Gaza, its ability to record deaths has steadily been hampered. Meanwhile, the Israelis have been killing at an astronomical rate, making it even more difficult for the Palestinians to keep an accurate count of their dead.

Over the last few days, Israeli bombardments have heavily intensified throughout the Gaza Strip. As it rains down bombs on a desperate population in the grip of starvation following a months-long complete siege of all essentials, more than 100 Palestinians are bring martyred every day. The most brutal recent attacks were carried out at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, where the Israelis claimed to have targeted Muhammad Sinwar, a Hamas leader and the younger brother of the legendary martyred Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar. In his purported pursuit, the Israeli barbarians dropped over 40 bunker buster bombs in and around the hospital, killing dozens in the process.

Prominent Israeli military commentators have produced some of the most depraved commentary on the supposed assassination attempt, portraying a picture of the Israeli military having completely mapped out the movement of the Hamas leadership and the Israeli prisoners of war from October 7.

Sample this commentary from a ghoulish Israeli propagandist:

The intelligence was clear. Sinwar’s men were operating in the tunnels and areas of the Nasser hospitals and the European hospital in eastern Khan Yunis. The Air Force first began attacking Nasser Hospital at night, where there were a significant number of terrorists, Sinwar’s men.

In the evening, it was time to strike the tunnel where Sinwar and several of his men were supposed to be. The strikes were precise, and the scope of the missiles and bombs dropped by the air force planes made it impossible for anyone in the tunnel to survive. If he was not hit by the explosion itself, he might die from asphyxiation from the gases from the missiles and bombs.

The cocksure nature of this reporting is astounding, considering the Israelis had zero clue about the whereabouts of their most wanted Hamas man, Yahya Sinwar. Only a day after when their troops sent in a drone to check on the half-dead, yet stick-wielding fighter, who they shelled to death, did they realise it was Yahya himself. Similarly, they pronounced many of the battalion commanders in Gaza dead only to see them lead the prisoner exchanges during the brief ceasefire earlier this year.

It’s safe to assume the Israelis have no credible intelligence on the leaders of the resistance inside Gaza.

Hamas is yet to comment on the fate of Muhammad Sinwar, but it would be entirely reasonable to treat the official Israeli version as yet another elaborate pretext to bomb a Gaza hospital. After all, they have bombed every single hospital in the besieged enclave at least once and completely dismantled some of the most prominent ones, including Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza.

Indeed, even the Israeli government has admitted that it has killed 82 percent civilians since the re-start of the bombing campaign after it collapsed the brief ceasefire in March. With a ratio of 4.5 civilians for every combatant, this is the most devastating war for civilians in recent warzones. This data, too, should be taken with a huge sack of salt, considering how clueless the Israelis have been about the resistance’s capabilities and strength in the Gaza Strip, and how indiscriminately they have dropped the US-made bombs.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which has staff on the ground in Gaza, has perhaps the more accurate casualty numbers. In a December 2023 report, it revealed nine civilian killings at the hands of the Israelis for every combatant fatality. The Geneva-based human rights monitor concluded that “the rate of civilian deaths in Israel’s war of extermination raging in the Gaza Strip is the highest in conflict areas worldwide in the 21st century, and that it seriously violates the principles of human rights and international humanitarian law, which state that the protection of civilians comes first and foremost.”

In a diabolical modus operandi, the Israelis have shown no appetite for fighting the men of the resistance — and have repeatedly come up woefully short in direct confrontations. But when it comes to killing unarmed, defenceless civilians, they have proven unmatched in modern, medieval, or even ancient history — as the mountains of Palestinian children’s corpses in Gaza testify.

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