The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declared Sunday that it had defeated a Hamas battalion in northern Gaza, one of the last regions not yet fully controlled by Israel, and where Israeli hostages are thought to be held.
The Times of Israel reported:
The Israel Defense Forces defeated Hamas’s Beit Hanoun battalion, the military declared on Saturday, after three of the terror group’s operatives surrendered to troops of the Givati Brigade in the northern Gaza town.
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The IDF has operated in Beit Hanoun five times since the beginning of the war, slowly degrading Hamas’s battalion there, which, before October 7, 2023, consisted of over 1,000 operatives.
The majority of the Hamas gunmen in the Beit Hanoun Battalion were either killed during the fighting or fled, like the battalion commander, Hussein Fayyad.
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz posted video of the surrender:
Meanwhile, Hamas continues to release videos of starving Israeli hostages — the only people confirmed to be starving in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded Sunday that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit the hostages, noting that preventing such visits, like the act of taking hostages itself, is a war crime.
In a statement, the prime minister’s office said:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with the head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the region, Julien Lerisson, and asked for his involvement in the immediate providing of food and medical care to our hostages.
The Prime Minister told Lerisson that Hamas’s starvation libel is reverberating around the world, while the systematic starvation is carried out against our hostages, who are being subjected to inhumane physical and mental abuse. The world cannot remain indifferent to the shocking images which are reminiscent of Nazi atrocities.
The Prime Minister demanded the involvement of the entire world in condemning the terror organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and ceasing direct and indirect support for them. The Prime Minister stressed that their actions violate international law and the Geneva Convention.
The Red Cross reiterated a demand that it be allowed to visit the hostages, and Hamas responded by saying it would allow the delivery of food and medicine, not visits as such, if Israel allowed permanent corridors for aid — in other words, if Israel withdrew from areas of Gaza it currently holds.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Photo: file
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