Gallant stated that Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade was “defeated and ceased to function as a military unit”.
According to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Israel has overcome Hamas’s significant Khan Younis brigade after two and a half months of intense combat in that southern Gaza Strip city and the militant group is looking for a successor for Yahya Sinwar, their leader in the territory.
Gallant stated that Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade was “defeated and ceased to function as a military unit” after evaluating the military situation with the Southern Command chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Major General Yaron Finkelman.
Khan Younis, the main city in the south of the Gaza Strip, was a major stronghold of Hamas and the power base of Sinwar, who is being searched for by the group’s leadership outside, based on information from the Israeli Defense Minister.
“The Hamas leaders have lost confidence in their ground commanders, this is very remarkable,” said the Defense chief and member of Israel’s war cabinet.
“The Hamas representation in Gaza is not answering, there is nobody to communicate with on the ground,” the minister said about Sinwar, whose location has been a mystery for months.
Israel has failed to locate him in more than four months of war, although it has discovered signs that he was hiding in underground tunnels in Khan Younis, but he has been constantly moving and it is unclear where he is, or if he is still in the territory.
Israel achieved a significant military victory after overcoming the powerful Khan Younis brigade – led by Sinwar’s own brother, Mohamed Sinwar – since that city had been its main challenge and it took over two months to secure it.
Israel declared two weeks ago that it had destroyed the main Hamas military base in the city, where it found important intelligence documents and weapons, but no evidence of the group’s leaders, such as the Sinwar brothers or the head of the al Qasam brigades, the armed wing of the group, Mohamed Deif.
It has besieged the city’s hospitals, Al Amal and Nasser, for almost a month, where it entered last Thursday, forcing the evacuation of more than 10,000 displaced people and hundreds of injured and ill people.
Gallant reported that at least “200 terrorist suspects” gave up to the troops in Nasser and several dozen in Al Amal, which shows a “lack of fighting morale among Hamas fighters,” since they surrendered instead of fighting due to the absence of internal leadership.
The minister said that, after the defeat in Khan Younis, Hamas only has “minor forces” left in the refugee camps in the center of the territory (Maghazi, Bureij or Nuseirat) and the Rafah brigade, the group’s last stronghold in the southern end of the Strip where Israel has vowed to attack soon.
“An Israeli decision is the only thing that prevents them from a complete collapse as a military system. There is no one who can assist them, neither the Iranians nor the international agencies,” Gallant added, who pledged to defeat the two battalions that still operate in the center and the four in Rafah.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, already announced a week ago that Israel would expand the ground offensive to Rafah – where more than 1.4 million Gazans live in overcrowded conditions, most of them displaced – given that leaving four battalions there would mean “losing the war ourselves”.
