The Israeli army carried out a raid of rare scale and violence in central Gaza on Saturday June 6 to free four hostages from the hands of Hamas. This operation, prepared for many weeks, took place under air support, in a densely populated residential area. At least 94 dead, including children, and more than 100 injured were taken to Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir El-Balah, according to a spokesperson for the hospital cited by the Associated Press agency. This assessment, which remains provisional and subject to doubt, would rank this operation among the deadliest since the start of the war. The health ministry in the enclave, where the Hamas administration continues to disintegrate, had reported earlier in the afternoon at least 55 deaths.
The announcement of the release of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv brought a sigh of relief across Israel, at the start of a scorching Shabbat afternoon, when beachgoers in Tel Aviv were stood up to applaud him. At 11 a.m., special forces had entered two buildings where these captives were held, in the open air and not in tunnels, close to numerous civilians, according to the army.
Exchanges of fire took place in these buildings and the surrounding alleys, and a special forces vehicle was immobilized during their escape, prompting massive bombardments to facilitate the extraction of its occupants. An officer from a special Israeli police unit was killed. The Hamas press office, for its part, put forward the figure of 210 dead in the Nousseirat camp, in the area where the hostages were freed.
Kidnapped during the Nova festival massacre
Israel said its forces had been preparing such a raid for weeks. According to army radio, the entrance to the 98e division in the refugee camps in the center of the enclave, in Bureij and Nousseirat, at the start of the week, was not yet another assault, nor a large-scale operation aimed at dismantling the Hamas brigades still relatively unscathed in the area . These troops were in reality preparing this rescue, the main objective of their deployment. The four hostages were examined in an Israeli hospital, where their families were to meet them, after 246 days of captivity.
All were captured during the Nova electronic music festival, which was held on October 7, 2023, approximately ten kilometers from where the raid took place on Saturday. An earthy valley dotted with eucalyptus groves, overlooking the Gazan refugee camp of Bureij, beyond the Israeli fortifications which surround the Palestinian enclave. Around 3,000 dancers were surprised by Hamas commandos in the early morning, and 364 were murdered – more than a quarter of the total victims of the Hamas assault. More than forty were kidnapped.
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