On Saturday, June 6, the Israeli army carried out a rare raid in central Gaza to free four hostages from the hands of Hamas. The operation, which had been weeks in the making, took place under air support in a densely populated residential area. At least 94 dead, including children, and more than 100 wounded were taken to the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, according to a hospital spokesman quoted by the Associated Press. This toll, which remains provisional and subject to caution, would rank this operation among the deadliest since the start of the war. The Ministry of Health in the enclave, where the Hamas administration continues to crumble, had reported earlier in the afternoon that at least 55 people had died.
The announcement of the release of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv brought a sigh of relief throughout Israel on a sweltering Shabbat afternoon, with beachgoers in Tel Aviv rising to applaud. By 11 am, special forces had entered two buildings where these captives were being held, in the open air rather than in tunnels, close to numerous civilians, according to the army.
Shots were exchanged in these buildings and the surrounding alleyways, and a special forces vehicle was immobilized during their escape, prompting massive shelling to facilitate the extraction of its occupants. An officer from a special Israeli police unit was killed. The spokesperson for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital put the death toll at 210 in the Nuseirat camp, in the area where the hostages were freed.
Kidnapped during the Nova Festival massacre
Israel said its forces had been preparing for such a raid for weeks. According to army radio, the entry of the 98th Division into the refugee camps in the center of the enclave, at Bureij and Nuseirat, at the beginning of the week, was not yet another assault, nor was it a large-scale operation aimed at dismantling the Hamas brigades still relatively unscathed in the area. These troops were in fact preparing the rescue, the main objective of their deployment. The four hostages were examined in an Israeli hospital, where their families were due to meet them after 246 days in captivity.
All had been captured during the Nova electronic music festival, held on October 7, 2023, some 10 kilometers from the site of Saturday’s raid. It is an earthy valley dotted with eucalyptus groves, overlooking the Gazan refugee camp of Bureij, beyond the Israeli fortifications that encircle the Palestinian enclave. Some 3,000 dancers had been surprised by Hamas commandos in the early hours of the morning, and 364 had been killed – more than a quarter of the total number of victims of the Hamas assault – and more than 40 were kidnapped.
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