The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declared victory Thursday in the battle of Rafah, having destroyed Hamas’s four battalions there over the course of four months.
It was a battle that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. president, told Israel not to fight, warning of the consequences for civilians there, and even threatening to withhold U.S. weapons.
“I have studied the maps,” Harris said, declaring that it was impossible to attack Rafah without hurting civilians.
Israel, believing it would lose the war without taking Rafah, entered anyway.
At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of eliminating the last remaining Hamas battalions. As of May 2024, Israel had destroyed 18 of those battalions, leaving four in Rafah and two in central Gaza. Without destroying the final six battalions, Netanyahu argued, it would be impossible to win the war.
After delaying from February to May, in the fact of opposition from Harris and President Joe Biden, Netanyahu proceeded with battle plans, and IDF troops seized the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border before turning toward the rest of Rafah, fighting neighborhood by neighborhood, street to street, and house to house.
As Breitbart News reported, the prime minister’s office declared Thursday that all of the Hamas battalions had been destroyed, and that Hamas was now reduced to guerrilla warfare and no longer functioning as a coherent military.
The Jewish News Syndicate added that the IDF formally declared victory in Rafah over the four battalions there:
The Israel Defense Forces has defeated Hamas’s Rafah brigade, the military declared on Thursday after four months of targeted raids in the area of the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city near the border with Egypt.
Since the start of the Rafah operation on May 6, troops have killed more than 2,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and destroyed some eight miles of underground smuggling and attack routes, according to an Israeli army statement on Thursday evening.
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The Rafah brigade and its four battalions—Yabna (south), east Rafah, Tel al-Sultan (west) and Shaboura (north)—was the terror group’s final functioning brigade, according to past Israel military assessments.
As Caroline Glick noted, U.S. Ambassador Jack Lew tried to claim credit on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration for Israel’s military success, claiming that Israel improved its military plans for Rafah by addressing U.S. objections.
The Biden administration claimed to be concerned about the fate of one million civilians who had left northern portions of Gaza to seek shelter in Rafah. Israel successfully evacuated those civilians from Rafah before attacking.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
