The Gazan neighbourhood of Shujaiya was the scene of a major battle between the Palestinian armed resistance and the Israeli occupation troops on 20 July 2014. It was during the so-called Operation Protective Edge and the result, after a Palestinian ambush, was dozens of dead amid intense Israeli bombardment. This network of alleys remains a pending challenge for the Israelis these days, 10 years later. In this war, Shujaiya, a densely populated area where access is difficult for tanks or armoured vehicles, has been the scene of some of the biggest failures of the invading troops.
There, on December 12, they suffered one of the worst ambushes, with a dozen soldiers killed. “Hamas is on the verge of dissolution,” said the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. But also in that same neighborhood, just three days later, Israeli soldiers killed three compatriots held hostage while they were trying to regain their freedom, waving a white flag. They thought it was an enemy trap and shot them.
These days in July, a decade after Operation Protective Edge, Shujaiya, located in the eastern part of Gaza City, remains one of the bastions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad that Israeli troops are unable to subdue. Somehow, the Palestinian resistance battalions are regrouping, rearming and flourishing again in parts of the Strip where they had been considered annihilated.
The Israeli army announced on Wednesday that its paratrooper brigade had destroyed more than 50 “terrorist infrastructures” in Shujaiya. The attacks targeted wells or areas from which Palestinian groups were operating with their weapons, and the Israelis also reported the seizure of weapons such as rifles, grenades and other combat material. The statement also said that members of the Israeli 98th Division eliminated “terrorists” (without specifying the number), located weapons and destroyed infrastructure. A bombing in the neighborhood left four dead and 17 wounded, announced the Qatari channel Al Jazeera on Wednesday.
That area of the Gaza capital, which has not regained calm since the war began in October, has seen fighting intensify after Israeli authorities issued a forced evacuation order to residents last week. They usually do this before launching attacks or intensive operations, even though international law prohibits expelling civilians in groups.
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On Tuesday, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters went further with a “complex, multi-phased” counterattack, according to an analysis of the developments of the conflict by the American think tank Critical Threats.
The Palestinians “first ambushed Israeli infantry in a building with a thermobaric rocket” and then “attacked the Israeli rapid reaction force with an explosively formed penetrating projectile (EFP), grenades and more thermobaric rockets,” the analysis said, based on sources on both sides. Hamas reported, without giving details, that several enemies had been killed in the most significant of the dozen attacks it claims to have launched in Shujaiya in recent days.
Throughout this week, soldiers from the 98th Division have tried to deactivate this battalion of the fundamentalist group that has been “partially” reactivated in the neighborhood since the last major clashes between both parties last April, according to Critical Threats.
For military analyst Guillermo Pulido, “the reappearance is basically due to the fact that Hamas and the rest of the terrorist groups in the Strip are carrying out an insurgent guerrilla strategy” that consists of “evading major battles.” “They disperse, remain hidden and thus avoid Israel’s superiority in firepower and technology from leading to the destruction of these terrorist groups,” he said over the phone.
Every day, Israeli soldiers raid various buildings in Shujaiya, where troops sometimes encounter booby traps in the midst of fighting that often takes place at very close range. The aim of the resistance, according to Pulido, is to try to “maintain the war indefinitely” despite being outnumbered by the hundreds of thousands of soldiers Israel can deploy in the Strip and the 30,000 to 50,000 Hamas fighters. Despite everything, “they cannot destroy them and so they tire them out.”
The death toll in Gaza since the war began on October 7 has risen to 37,953, according to data released Wednesday by Hamas government health authorities. Israeli bombings and attacks are also intensifying in the south, especially in Khan Yunis, the second largest town in the Palestinian enclave, and Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli army has carried out a ground raid and airstrikes on the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem. There, an airstrike killed four people who, according to Israeli military sources, were handling explosives. There are also clashes in Jenin, where at least one Palestinian has been killed.
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