IDF emphasizes it will return to Shejaiya if needed as second round of operations near end

The IDF on Tuesday said that if need be, it will reinvade Shejaiya in northern Gaza even a third time as it nears the end of its second invasion of the area.

Further, the IDF said that anywhere that Hamas tries to reconstitute either its military or political organizations and governance, the military will return a potentially unlimited number of times to break up such attempted comebacks.

The IDF first invaded Shejaiya in the mid-fall, had operational control of Shejaiya by early January, and then its 98th Division invaded again on June 27.

According to the IDF, the second invasion is close to completion, having killed around 150 Hamas terrorists and destroyed between six to nine significant tunnels, including a large new command and control tunnel of 2.5 kilometers.

Primarily, the goals of this second invasion were to cut off any Hamas reestablishment of command and control coordination as well as to eliminate key tunnels it was using to maneuver beneath IDF aerial detection to set up its ambushes of IDF forces.

Some of the tunnels that the IDF destroyed came up to the Israeli border fence or dangerously close to that point.

Moreover, IDF forces checked the effectiveness of air force bombing tunnels to map out which tunnels such attacks had destroyed and which tunnels needed additional attention from engineering units to finish the job.

The IDF said that some of the tunnels it eliminated in this second round were only discovered using computers and disks captured during the initial round, which took time to analyze and decipher.

It added that additional computers and discs were captured then, which could be used to gather intelligence for future operations.

IDF sources did not share any breakthroughs in intelligence relating to the remaining 120 or so hostages, of which 50-70 are estimated, according to a variety of Jerusalem Post sources, to be still alive.

While a few Hamas fighters stood and fought against the IDF invasion in an organized way, many of them were killed while trying to set up ambushes by using mortars, drones, or other attack items.

The IDF emphasized that a decisive and absolute victory over a terror group, as opposed to a country and standard armed forces, would not necessarily have a set point and was more part of an ongoing process of wearing down Hamas’s ability to try to mount comebacks.

JPost