Israeli troops say they face determined Hamas fighters

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FROM A1 When their troops went in, Israeli military officers say, they were surprised by the tenacity, training and weaponry of their opponents. They said Israeli soldiers were repeatedly hit by Gaza militants firing from windows, employing land mines and setting booby traps. “It was a very hard battle there,” a senior Israeli military official said.

“I have to admit that we were facing good fighters from the other side.” The seven-hour attack by Israeli artillery and tank shells, followed by small-arms gun battles in the streets, left the district in ruins. There were bodies in the streets and gray-faced Palestinians being dug out of the rubble and stacked into ambulances.

Thousands of residents had fled in the middle of the night, many barefoot. The Gaza Health Ministry said 70 Palestinians were killed in the fighting in the Shijaiyah district on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City, the new front line. In all, more than 100 Palestinians died Sunday.

Hamas health officials, in keeping with their practice, did not say whether the dead were civilians or fighters. Sami Abu Zohri, a Hamas spokesman, called the Israeli offensive in Shijaiyah “a massacre” and “a war crime.” More than 445 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have died in the nearly two-week-long offensive.

The Hamas military also announced that its fighters had captured an Israeli soldier. Abu Obaida, a spokesman for the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, appeared on Hamas TV to announce that the soldier had been taken prisoner. Minutes later, there were fireworks on the streets and shouts of “God is great!” from loudspeakers in the mosques.

An Israeli military spokesman said the army was investigating the claim and did not confirm the abduction. It was the single worst day so far for Israelis. Israeli military deaths have risen to 18 since the armed forces launched a ground operation Thursday. Two of the Israeli soldiers were U.S. citizens.

The Israeli death toll is now higher than during the Israeli military’s 2009 incursion into Gaza, when 13 Israelis were killed. More than 77 soldiers have entered hospitals countrywide, some of them seriously wounded.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

This is the page where an American paper does call Bennett a hardliner, and also prints him floating the overthrow of the Gaza government. The headline, though, belongs to the Israeli soldiers' admiration for their opponents.

Column 2 carries the Israeli military's human-shields claim ('Hamas fighters had ordered them not to leave, effectively employing them as human shields, the Israeli official said') followed immediately by the Palestinian rebuttal ('Residents, however, said they had been told to move before by the Israelis, only to return to their homes'), which is better balanced than most of this batch.

Column 3 also carries the Red Crescent's two-hour ceasefire and 'seven stretchers were carried out of the rubble' in ten minutes on one street. 'Occupied' does not appear.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli troops say they face determined Hamas fighters," The Day, 21 July 2014, p. jump from A1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-058. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-058