How an Israeli raid freed four hostages and killed dozens of Palestinians in Gaza

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — They arrived in the middle of the day, when the squat concrete buildings of the Nuseirat refugee camp are stuffy and the narrow streets outside are crowded with people. No one suspected anything until the shots rang out.

The Israeli raid took everyone by surprise – from the Hamas fighters guarding four hostages in two different buildings to the thousands of civilians who soon found themselves running for their lives in fierce crossfire.

At the end of the war, four Israeli hostages had been brought home alive and, at least physically, largely unharmed, and at least 274 Palestinians and one Israeli commando had been killed.

For Israel, it was the most successful operation of the eight-month war, sparking jubilation across the country and mitigating the unprecedented collapse of the army on October 7. For the Palestinians, it was a day of horror, with hundreds of dead and injured pouring into already overburdened hospitals.

This is what happened, according to Israeli military and Palestinian witnesses:

“THE ULTIMATE SURPRISE”

Noa Argamani, a 26-year-old who had become an icon of the hostage crisis, was held in one apartment, and three male hostages – Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 – were in another apartment about 200 meters away. All had been kidnapped from a desert site during the October 7 attack that sparked the war and resulted in a massacre.

They were taken to various locations but were never held in Hamas’s notorious tunnels. At the time of their rescue, they were in locked rooms guarded by Hamas fighters. Israeli intelligence found out where they were and commandos practiced the raid for weeks on life-size models of the buildings, said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman.

“It has to be like a surgical procedure, like brain surgery,” he said.

He said they decided to attack at noon because it would be the “ultimate surprise,” and to attack both buildings at the same time. Planners feared that if the hijackers did one first, they would hear the commotion and kill the hostages in the other.

Hagari declined to say how Israeli forces entered the heart of Nuseirat, a crowded refugee camp in central Gaza that dates back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Previous operations indicate that at least some of the special forces who took part in the raid were likely dressed like Palestinians and spoke fluent Arabic.

Kamal Benaji, a Palestinian displaced from Gaza City who was living in a tent in central Nuseirat, said he saw a small truck with a car in front and another behind it stop in front of a building on the street where he had pitched his tent.

The commandos jumped out of the truck and one of them threw a grenade into the house. “There were clashes and explosions everywhere,” he said.

A VEHICLE REMAINS DETENTION AND A FIRE BREAKS OUT

Argamani’s rescue apparently went smoothly, while the team that freed the other three hostages ran into difficulties.

Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, an officer in an elite police unit, was fatally wounded in the break-in that killed all the Hamas guards, Amos Harel, a veteran defense correspondent, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Then the rescue vehicle carrying the three hostages got stuck in the camp, he said.

Palestinian militants armed with machine guns and anti-tank guns opened fire on the rescuers, while Israel called in heavy attacks from land and air to cover their evacuation to the coast. “There was heavy fire all around us,” Hagari said.

It seems that this bombardment has killed and injured so many Palestinians.

Mohamed al-Habash, another displaced Palestinian, was in the Nuseirat market looking for humanitarian aid or cheap food when the heavy bombing began. He and half a dozen other people were taking shelter in a damaged house. He said many more homes were hit.

“We heard very loud bombs and heavy gunfire,” he said. “We saw a lot of fighter jets flying over the area.”

Israeli rescue workers eventually reached the coast. Zamora was evacuated by helicopter and later died of his injuries in a hospital. The military renamed the operation in his honor.

Footage released by the military showed soldiers leading the hostages along the beach to the water and helicopters kicking up clouds of sand as they took off.

“We called the hostages diamonds, so we say we have the diamonds in our hands,” Hagari said.

THE CONSEQUENCES

The dead and injured – men, women and children – began arriving in droves at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah. It is one of the last functioning medical facilities in the area and was already full of people wounded in heavy attacks in recent days.

Samuel Johann, a coordinator of the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders, which works at the hospital, called it a “nightmare.”

“There have been mass casualties after mass casualties because densely populated areas have been bombed. This is far beyond what could be handled in any functioning hospital, not to mention the scarce resources we have here,” he said in a statement from the group.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed and around 700 injured. The ministry did not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its figures, but said 64 children and 57 women were among the dead.

Khulood Shalaq, who was being treated at another hospital with her injured one-year-old nephew, said 14 members of her family were killed in the attack, with some still buried under the rubble. She said she at one point saw four helicopters firing missiles at the camp.

“The streets are full of corpses,” she said.

Hamas later released a video claiming that three more hostages, including an American, were killed in the bombing, but provided no evidence. The army said it “does not respond to statements from terrorist organizations.”

Hamas and other militant groups still hold about 120 hostages, about a third of whom are believed to have died. Hagari acknowledged that a ceasefire would bring more hostages home than military operations, but said Israeli forces would have to “create conditions” to bring them home.

“We are doing things that are unimaginable and we will continue to do things that are unimaginable,” he said.

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Jeffery reported from Jerusalem and Chehayeb from Beirut. Associated Press writer Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Gaza at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.