Battle in Jabaliya draws on history of struggle in complex ambush of Israeli troops, with Jon Elmer

now we'll go to jabalia where the main operations have been of course the brutal Siege um thanks to Maxwell for updating our map we've got jabalia Camp here where people can see and Bahia is uh in the Northwest and early in the war the place that the Israelis came in the early days of the war was down the coast so the Israelis control the coastline uh to the west of B lahia so that has been a key part of their battle strategy theyed usually come in from the East over through Shaya rifat talked about how Shaya was um always a center of resistance because they're the closest to the border to the east well this war Israel changed it up and had a different strategy they came down through the nerim corridor and pushed on Gaza City from the North and then they came rather than coming east and pushing into Shaya where they expected stiff resistance they moved over and came down the coastline from B lahia so the first battles were in banon and B lahia but the second battles were in telawa on the coast there um which was surprising to me um that they that that was their move but that is they came across the corridor and up and attacked Gaza City from the south um and so these battles in jabalia that we're going to see here this one major operation um takes place in the west of jabalia because the Israelis controlled the coastline so let's take a look at um number 10 because that was the one we showed before yeah here Army radio put this out kind of without Israeli Army Radio kind of without any comment it's almost like they're proud of it um this is jabalia before and jabalia after and I've shown you this of Rafa we've shown you this of all places that Israel has occupied um it just physical eraser of the environment it's absolutely disgusting and devastating that this is allowed to happen and the uh accountability for these crimes has to be a priority for the International Community going forward um we've watched on Israeli social media the Glee um the absolute Glee the soldiers have in destroying this landscape um Brick by Brick House by house um and so I just wanted to show you that disgusting uh this disgusting image and I just I don't have any other word for it and this is the other part that's horrifying the uh Aid flow the 500 trucks a day is The Siege level from before the war that was the Gaza Siege if we were doing this show in 2021 we would be talking about The Siege on Gaza and how things are products are not getting in 500 there hasn't been there hasn't been more than 300 at any point in this war and if you look down at December you're seeing zero a shipments to the north the north is Western Ares AES and gate 96 and you can see that none of those colors are in December the north is not getting any aid and there's days where there's no trucks at all getting into Gaza they're starving the population they're destroying the physical infrastructure and that is the goal of the war to terrorize the children to CH to starve them and to starve their own people and the military has pointed that out a number of times um but this has been 70 days now um 70 plus days of the siege of jabalia and this um un this the numbers from this graph are from from unra from the UN relief Works agency who manages the aid in Gaza so um I just wanted to give you that context now we're going to look at number 12 here and I'm going to let you hear this fighter uh there's audio in at the beginning of of number 12 here that we're going to listen to [Music] that's an incredible shot so we've seen these Fighters uh s we've seen them reading novels in position waiting for that waiting for the enemy and he was singing and he was singing you come Mahmud he's singing about Mahmud aaja who's a a a an instrumental fighter I'll tell you I'll tell you more about it after we watch this so this is an efp this is um s K's version of the shawah the explosively formed penetrator they're on the street here this video is incredible you got to watch it on my Twitter with the the sound because they have made essentially a mini movie with this one um you can see the soldiers head sticking out of this tank here and he's got his Yassin 105 out the window with an elevated firing position um H and the uh we're going to see here in a second the the hit on the tank that has separated the helmet from um we're showing this Burning this is s could says this is the tank that was hit burning and they show in this next shot here you can see the helmet that was on that uh Israeli tanker is now on the ground um after this operation and then they're showing you here the positions that they're in and this is interesting this is a rifle grenade um this is an original weapon that Gaza used to use um back in the earliest days of the arm struggle it's a grenade that you put on the end of your rifle and fire it uh as a projectile um kind of as an artillery um but as we go back uh and watch this one more time I want to explained mm AA and what they're singing singing he's singing essentially a folk song and the fighter so his buddy says who's that about and he says it's about Mahmud Kua who's the he says he's the founder of the military G and that's exactly what he was in the early 1980s Mahmud Kaja was um was a singularly focused on arm struggle um and getting the Islamic movement to join the armed struggle that the at that time was led by the leftists in the pflp um and the nationalists and he was inspired by the Iranian Revolution as many were um to to fight and to to flip the order to have Liberation come before your Islamic State rather then uh build the Islamic State for Liberation um and he used to get a lot of grief uh Mahmud quaja he would be attacked um in the mosques he was attacked But ultimately he convinced um his persistence convinced and um the Islamic Jihad Fighters and their fighting Spirit convinced um formed the nucleus of the Armed struggle which which Hamas had to then essentially respond to Islamic Jihad um and also form a the cassam brigades what became the cassam brigades so this is really the nucleus of the Armed struggle that this fighter in jabalia is T is singing a folk song about and the folk song is the eulogy for from the assassination of Mahmud aaja and it was written by Ramadan Shala who was the late Secretary General of Islamic Jihad um and it's just a beautiful um eulogy um says um you you come Muhammad from the chains uh Mahmud sorry you come Mahmud from the chains Mahmud rises from our fighting blood from the laughter of our children and the grief of our widows um It's Just Another Part of uh of the eulogy by Ramadan Shala says um T because he was assassinated assumed to be assassinated by the Israelis it says you psychotic killer just wait you you my blood spilled will not write your Victory it engraves in stone my birth and your death my spilled blood will not write your Victory Israel it engraves in stone my birth the birth of the Armed struggle and the Revolution and it um engraves your death um and what what we're seeing here is Fighters two generations later referring back to the foundations of the Armed struggle in this and it's just a it's a remarkable moment part of the eulogy says Mahmud you are the gun you are the pen you are the map you are the flag you are Palestine and you flow Mahmud from the tears of the refugee camp you appear Mahmud from our fighting Spirit you appear Mahmood from The Thirst and hunger of our prisoners Mahmud you come you come from the chains of the prisons into the laughter of our children and the sorrow of our widows you will always be there Mahmud so that's from the 19 early 1990s and we have fighters in 2024 sitting in their battle position waiting to carry out this operation which is a remarkable operation to be carried out 70 days into um into the The Siege on jabalia um and to just link it back to that struggle and to understand the history of that struggle and what mahmuda kaaja fought through um to ultimately unify the Islamic movement and he carried out commanded some of the early operations with Yahya aash who was the um first bomb maker for Kasam and they work together Islamic Jihad and Kasam work together on operations um that predate really the political organization of Hamas that comes after and that's an important thing to always note because when we're talking about Hamas the uh Hamas movement is a political movement in Gaza some people support Hamas some people don't like any government in any country but the the resistance movement the kasan brigades are uniformly supported throughout Gaza um the fighters are seen as the heroes of their society they're not seen as an arm of Hamas they're seen as the cassam brigades who fight for Palestine if the government of Hamas were to be elected out of government there that would not change how people feel about the cassam brigades and these Fighters and that story is just a remarkable story and this next one is also a remarkable one number 13 um what we're going to see here is a Kasam operation in the western edge and it says Monday December 9th 67 days into the brutal Siege Kasam carried out a qualitative operation a tight Ambush against enemy personnel and armored vehicles west of the jabalia camp they called this the alphal Lua Ambush it's near the in the alphal Lua neighborhood of West of and we see here the fighter looking on a closed circuit television again and on the top of the table is the map and he's planning out the operation but on the Whiteboard um it says Imad akel Battalion Imad akel was the first commander of kassam he was an operative he was their spokesperson he was their weapons M maker um he and they have named a Special Forces Unit after him on the board it says Imad akal you're the father of zero distance um and it also says we do not give up we win or we die and Ahmad akil's zero distance is um he was famous for operations um primarily targeted against Israeli police and collaborators um and the zero distance name comes from well-planned operations Imad Akil would carry out where he would literally climb on the roof uh on the hood of a car and shoot a collaborator at and take their guns and the killing of collaborators was the key part of the uh early days of Hamas of Kasam and SEL kuds um because the collaborators were killing them um but also the collaborators had guns and so you kill you killed the collaborator and took their guns and now the resistance movement had weapons that came from the Israelis and here these are Fighters praying they're praying for the martyrs in the camp they're praying for the wounded civilians um in the camp and in Gaza in general the fighters are always deeply connected to the people that they're defending and that's part of their popularity what we're looking at here is an operation that's going to be against uh an Israeli engineering unit that is leaving Gaza they're going out on Furlow they have been in Gaza for three months there you see them with their bags packed ready to go home on social media they they posted about how they were going home um and here they are being watched getting in the back of a troop transporter truck Kasam finds them with field reconnaissance they point out the commander says because of field reconnaissance they watched this and they got them they got them in the back of that truck um I've edited these videos again so that they can stay um online you can watch the full video on my Twitter feed um but they got these guys they fired on them they fired a thermobaric uh Yasin strike against them and this is the the window that they're in soldiers in a window still 14 months on and this was a very successful operation they killed at least three of these Special Forces soldiers and this is showing you the before and after they're getting on to the truck and from Army Radio this is from Army Radio according to the initial IDF probe the incident took place this morning at an IDF encampment in jabalia as the troops were getting ready to head out of the strip for a Furlow for a bre Break um the troops were boarding a lightly armored truck using uh using transport troop they were bordering a lightly Armored Transport troop troop transporter sorry when Hamas operatives launched anti-tank projectiles and open fire on them three soldiers were killed 12 others were wounded seriously during the fighting um and six others were lightly wounded including reservists from the artillery core Sky Riders un uh unit which are in serious condition um the operation took the number of IDF soldiers admitted killed to over 40 in the jabalia operation so as you can see here this is the fighters uh the commander they have the closed line they're able to CCTV watch Surveillance after 70 days of Devastation in jabalia they're planning out the operation with this Special Forces Unit the Ahad akal Battalion is a is a Kasam special Forces Unit we've heard from them a few times during the war U but you can see they're all in tactical gear um ready to carry out this operation um and the story of Imad ail is uh a really important one in the history of the resistance as well he was born in jabalia Camp so this is C fighters in jabalia saluting fighters from jabalia something we've seen all along um and Akil was driven out of majal ashalon like most Gaza Gaza driven out of the Gaza envelope what is now the Gaza envelope like uh many other leading figures like Abu abeda was uh from maal as well he was killed when he was 22 years old but before dying uh at 22 years old he became the first Kasam operative a commander who carried out the nucleus of building the Kasam brigades from their youth movement um he was their spokesperson he's the first person to to be a spokesperson and he wore his cfia in a similar way um to and Abu abeda wears it a bit tighter but abua has on a number of occasions worn it exactly the same way as amadil did as a salute to him um and you can see graffiti and paintings all over Gaza of amaril um mahmuda zahar who's a senior leader um the senior most leader political leader of uh Hamas wrote a book about um Imad ail ail carried out something like 30 oper operations killed 11 soldiers many times the Israelis lied about how many soldiers were killed um and so he was part of the Hezbollah generation of recording operations as proof of what happened and I like I said they call him the father of zero distance because a number of his ambushes were well prepared ambushes where he would literally jump on the on the on the trunk of a car on the hood of a car and carry out the execution um of the collaborators um he targeted shabbach the internal Israeli internal security he targeted their soldiers he targeted their prison guards so just really well uh placed operations against the most repressive figures in the Gaza Strip and that's how he got um that's how he got so famous uh was for those operations and interestingly he was sheltered in Shaya just down the road from uh where rafat lived um with the farhot family and he would carry out his action half the day he would carry out these operations and the other half of the day he would dig a tunnel underneath the house um and he was so in in many ways was the forebearer of the uh concept of uh the tunnels for the resistance Fighters under um in this case under miam farad's house and ultimately he was killed in 1993 after two years on the Run he was killed in a in a shootout um in shaja um at that time uh when he was caught in his tunnel by a collaborator collaborator turned him in and that's why the cassam brigades first units were anti- collaborator units because the collaborators were playing a critical role in destroying the armed struggle israelies used those collaborators um to devastating effect in those early years and the trajectory of that is to today where the collaborators are not a factor in Gaza anymore we have one more number 14 is just um from the rest of that video which is showing the destroyed D9 bulldozers that I told you about earlier there you can see what I described a couple weeks ago what the cockpit looks like the seats of the commander and the driver are um are at different levels which makes it um those hits on the cockpit that much more devastating so you can see here um these are disabled Vehicles disabled uh disabled tanks and armored bulldozers and at the end of the at the end of the video this is attached to the same video amadil operation and it says we don't surrender or give up we win or we die and that's uh you know martyrdom or Victory is the only these these Fighters are not going to give up and that's where it says that so that is the resistance report from Rafa and jabalia um day uh 400 and 39 still going um no signs of let up