Channel 13 in Israel reported on December 21 that the elite Golani Brigade of the army had left Gaza after 60 days of war to “reorganize its ranks” because it had lost so many soldiers in the first few weeks of the battle in the strip.
The news comes just a few days after it was said that the special infantry unit had lost a lot of soldiers in the ground attack on Gaza.
An Israeli general who is now retired said this week that the Golani Brigade has lost 88 men since October 7. The former general said that 72 people were killed on the first day of the war, which is about a quarter of the whole brigade.
At the end of October, Israel turned the small attacks it had been making into a full-scale ground strike. Israel’s troops have been killed every day since then by ambushes set by the Gaza resistance.
The Israeli army said in a statement the day before that it had “operational control” over the Shujaiya neighborhood in northern Gaza. That’s when the Golani Brigade left. The ground war is now mainly happening in the south of Gaza, but fighting is still going on in the north of the strip, even though the army said earlier that they had really hurt Hamas there.
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The Palestine Chronicle says that Israel said it had control over Shujaiya “to lessen the shock of the news that its most elite fighting force had been essentially defeated, forcing it to retreat early.”
Most of the Israeli army’s trouble since the ground war began has been in the Shujaiya neighborhood in northern Gaza.
New video from December 21 shows the exact moment that the elite Golani Brigade was struck in Shujaiya. As soldiers rush to help a hurt soldier, screams can be heard. The soldier’s GoPro camera caught the whole thing on video.
The statements and videos that Hamas’ Qassam Brigades put out through their media channel show that Israeli troops face these kinds of ambushes every day.
In one attack in Shujaiya on December 12, seven men of the Golani Brigade were killed.
Col. Itzhak Ben Basat, who was in charge of the commander’s team for the Golani Brigade, and Tomer Grinberg, who was in charge of the 13th Battalion for the Golani Brigade, were both killed.
In early December, Grindberg was caught on camera telling the Israeli people that they would have “a resounding victory” in Gaza.
Israeli losses are much lower than the real number of soldiers killed or hurt. According to new hospital statistics cited by Hebrew media, soldier deaths are being reported half as low as they really are.
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