Israel’s Military Says It Eliminated Half the Leadership of Hamas Military Wing

[Pelican Press 0]

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*******’s Military Says It Eliminated Half the Leadership of ****** Military Wing

*******’s military has said that it had ******* or captured around 14,000 combatants in Gaza since the war there began more than nine months ago, an unverifiable and ambiguous number that gives a measure of *******’s assessment of its progress toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of destroying ******.

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on Tuesday, the ******** military also said that it had eliminated half the leadership of ******’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and that among those ******* were 20 commanders of battalions, the largest grouping of ******’s forces, and 150 company commanders.

It said that it had struck 37,000 targets in Gaza from the air and more than 25,000 sites that it described as ********** infrastructure and launch sites during the war. That figure did not appear to equate to the number of airstrikes, since some targets have been struck multiple times.

******* has only occasionally released overall numbers for the toll the war has taken. It has previously said that it has ******* more than 14,000 of ******’s estimated 25,000 fighters and, in March, Mr. Netanyahu was quoted in an interview with Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, as saying that

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.

In its latest report, the military gave little detail about the 14,000 people it called terrorists who it said were ******* or captured through late June.

A military spokesman gave no additional details when asked how many of the 14,000 had been apprehended and how many *******. The military also did not say how it had arrived at that number, or how it had distinguished combatants from civilians.

Critics of the war contend that ******* is too quick to identify any man ******* as a fighter.

Throughout the war, there has been heated debate about how many people have ***** in Gaza, what proportion of those were fighters, and how many combatants ****** has left.

The Gaza Health Ministry on Tuesday said that more than 38,000 people had been ******* in Gaza since the start of the conflict, and nearly 90,000 others had been injured. The ministry does not offer separate counts of fighters and noncombatants, but it has said consistently that most of the ***** have been civilians.

Just as with the numbers cited by *******, there was no way to independently confirm the ministry’s. Those numbers also showed that the rate of deaths in the war had slowed in recent months.

While the health ministry’s tally is broadly accepted, its ability to keep records has been undermined by the severe damage to the health sector caused by ******** airstrikes and fighting, and some experts have questioned elements of the ministry’s methodology and data. The ministry has periodically cautioned that there are doubtless bodies under the ruins of collapsed buildings that have not been found and added to the toll.

The ministry has at times published names of the *****, and in April it listed nearly 25,000 people it said it had identified, which showed that 60 percent of those ******* were women, children and older people. In December,

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as saying that two-thirds of the ***** in Gaza were civilians.

****** has taken advantage of the urban areas in Gaza to provide its fighters and weapons infrastructure with an extra layer of protection, running tunnels under neighborhoods, launching rockets near civilian homes and holding hostages in city centers. Ghazi Hamad, a senior ****** official,

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that the group tries to keep ************ civilians out of harm’s way.

In a separate graphic, the military named the ****** battalion commanders it said it had eliminated. Military experts say ******* has been largely successful in degrading the main units of ******’s fighting force. The ***** included Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of ******’s military wing in Gaza and a presumed mastermind of the Oct. 7 *******, who was ******* in an ******** airstrike in March.

But it did not include as a confirmed casualty Muhammad Deif, the elusive leader of ******’s military wing, whom ******* targeted with airstrikes on Saturday. Gaza’s Health Ministry said that at least 90 people were *******, about half of them women and children, and 300 were wounded in the *******.

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#Israels #Military #Eliminated #Leadership #****** #Military #Wing

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