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Soldiers killed fighting against Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip on December 12, 2023 (Courtesy; combo image: Times of Israel)
Palestinian Authority/Gaza, December 13, 2023
Ten soldiers, including two senior officers, killed in Gaza fighting and deadly ambush
Original source
Ten Israel Defense Forces soldiers, including two senior commanders and several officers, were killed in heavy fighting in Gaza, the army said Wednesday, bringing the death toll in the ground offensive to 115.
Nine of the soldiers were killed in a battle in the heart of Shejaiya, one of the deadliest single encounters since troops pushed into the Strip.
The IDF named those killed in the battle in Shejaiya as Col. Itzhak Ben Basat, 44, head of the Golani Brigade’s commander’s team, from Sde Ya’akov; Lt. Col. Tomer Grinberg, 35, the commander of the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, from Almog; Maj. Roei Meldasi, 23, a company commander in the 13th Battalion, from Afula; Maj. Moshe Avram Bar On, 23, a company commander in the Golani Brigade’s 51st Battalion, from Ra’anana; Cpt. Liel Hayo, 22, a platoon commander in the 51st Battalion, from Shoham; Sgt. Achia Daskal, 19, a soldier in the 51st Battalion, from Haifa; Sgt. Eran Aloni, 19, of the 51st Battalion, from Ofakim. Maj. Ben Shelly, 26, a squad commander in the Israeli Air Force’s Unit 669, from Kidron; and Sgt. First Class Rom Hecht, 20, of Unit 669, from Givatayim.
Ben Basat is the most senior IDF officer to have been killed in the ground offensive against Hamas.
Staff Sgt. Oriya Yaakov, 19, of the Combat Engineering Corps’ 614th Battalion, from Ashkelon, was killed in a separate incident in northern Gaza. The army said another three soldiers were seriously wounded.
The Times of Israel was told that according to an initial investigation, on Tuesday evening infantry soldiers from the Golani Brigade, working together with armor and engineering forces, were carrying out search operations in the kasbah, or the heart of Shejaiya, long seen as one of the most heavily fortified Hamas strongholds in northern Gaza.
The initial force of four soldiers entered a cluster of three buildings — believed to have been abandoned — surrounding a courtyard, to carry out searches and found the entrance of a tunnel. As the troops entered one of the buildings, Hamas terrorists ambushed them, hurling grenades, detonating an explosive device, and opening fire on them.
All four soldiers were hit by the explosive inside the building, as gunfire continued from outside the structure.
At this stage, a second group of troops outside tried to reach them, but contact with the officer of the force was lost. Local commanders then initiated emergency procedures amid fears the soldiers could have been captured.
Several senior Golani officers immediately led forces to the area, including Ben Bassat, who led the rescue operation, Grinberg, of the 13th Battalion, and two other battalion commanders, who set up a perimeter to give the rescue force cover.
Grinberg led a flanking movement from the north, while the commander of the Golani’s reconnaissance battalion made a similar move from the south, and the commander of the 188th Armored Brigade’s 53rd Battalion did so from another angle.
During the rescue attempts the forces were under continuous gunfire from terrorists inside the buildings, who also threw grenades and set off several more large blasts.
The rescue force reached the initial group of four soldiers but found that they had all been killed. During this battle two soldiers from the Air Force’s elite Unit 669 search and rescue team were killed as they tried to break into the compound.
At that stage, Grinberg’s force came under massive fire from a second building. Troops responded, including by firing a shoulder-launched missile into the building which apparently detonated several other explosives inside and blew up the entire building.
The military believes Hamas’s Shejaiya battalion’s command and control is largely disrupted, and the terror group is operating in the area in a less organized manner, with smaller squads of terrorists. The military did not give an indication of how many operatives were killed in the fight. Hamas has not made any statements about the battle.
The deadly incident continues the Golani Brigade’s bitter connection with Shejaiya. During the 2014 Gaza war, seven brigade soldiers were killed when their APC was hit in fighting in Shejaiya. The remains of one of the seven, Sgt. Oron Shaul, were captured by Hamas and are still in their hands.
Grinberg’s 13th Battalion has also been one of the hardest hit units during the October 7 Hamas onslaught, when some 3,000 terrorists overran IDF bases and communities in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking a further 240 hostage.
The battalion lost 41 soldiers that day. Nevertheless, they have been involved in some of the heaviest fighting since the launch of the ground operation aimed at freeing the hostages and destroying Hamas’s military force in the Strip...
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