Palestinian drone strikes Israeli military position in Rafah, with Jon Elmer

So, as ever, we're going to start in the south because last week I told you that the main force that was in Rafa, the 162nd Division, is the division that moved up north to Jabalia. They left one brigade behind in um in Rafa to patrol the corridor, the Philadelphia corridor on the border with Egypt. Um and they are also working along the buffer zone. Um maybe we could do the zoom-in map tomorrow. You can see the buffer zone um sort of between Khan Yunis uh and Rafa is the area that they Israelis have been operating on looking for offensive tunnels that cross the border. Um and so our first operation um is going to show that. There was more than 10 operations in Rafa this week uh alone. So, uh Rafa didn't um they didn't get the memo that the uh Israeli military was was re-centering the battle uh and the Rafa Brigade continued the battle in the south, which is um something that we're going to see it's a theme we're going to see today. Uh all the fighters stay in their positions. The Rafa Brigade doesn't leave Rafa when the Israeli military leaves Rafa, just like the Jabalia Brigade doesn't leave Jabalia, and that's why they're there the day the Israelis move from Rafa to Jabalia. The fighters aren't moving around, and when we get to Jabalia, we'll talk more about that. Um but the fighters remain in Rafa and are fighting fiercely the Israelis. There was three serious IED, there was seven qualitative operations in Rafa, three ID IED operations, um and five anti-tank operations, um and killed two soldiers in with anti-tank fire, um several severely injured in Rafa. So, continuing to take a toll on the flattened Rafa. The only success that the Israeli military has had in Rafa is to flatten the civilian buildings and when they leave Rafa and they left behind one Brigade that's now under the control of the Gaza division. So that's the division that's responsible for the Gaza Strip as Ali and Asa just described and so they they left that skeleton crew behind and they got hit hard and we're going to take a look at that. We'll look at number one here first. We'll show you pretty spectacularly one of those IEDs. This is a booby trap tunnel entrance. This is an engineering unit using caterpillar uh front end loaders and bulldozers and their bulldozer or their front end the uh excavator um pulls the tunnel entrance and detonates um and detonates the explosives that were rigged on those tunnel entrances. You can see the two soldiers that were there behind. The Israelis said that um he was a commander of the military engineering he was a combat officer from the military engineering uh school who was killed and another seriously injured in this uh operation from last week. We'll show it again. We'll loop it around again. This is the um the medical evacuation and again not firing on those uh medical evacuations. We're going to see that all through this show again. Uh the Palestinians have the opportunity to do that and are choosing to not. Um so that's caterpillar uh gear there. You can see the armored excavator the armored bulldozer wheeled bulldozer not a D9. That's a wheeled bulldozer that you see in the back there. Peoria, Illinois on the BDS list. It's going to be a few uh BDS list targets in this resistance report and um it's just I think important to keep showing this resistance. You know, the resistance of the civilians that Abu Bakr showed so eloquently and devastatingly today, the courage that the civilians are fighting as well with matches the um the fighters who as they say fight in the same trench as their people. Um and so this is an operation along the buffer zone. So this is this is you could say this is south of Khan Yunis, north of Rafa. It's in sort of the no man's land between that area. Um and just a qualitative operation. You could see it. They've got it on camera. No one can tell you uh because of the media ops embedded within the Qassam Brigades and Saraya al-Quds primarily. Um nobody can say that these operations didn't happen and the Israeli military has to claim their casualties after operations like this, although they don't always. But they did in this case after this operation and a couple other operations that I'm going to show over the course of this show. And look at number two is is also a qualitative operation. Uh 11, what are we? 12 months into the 13th month of this battle. Uh and we're seeing Zouari drones here um still being used. These were used on October 7th. I've done a couple pieces on them uh over the course of the last year. They were you can see there they've got a 3D printed casing there for the camera that they've set up on it. So they're going to turn this drone into a first-person view, an FPV. Um so it's going to take us along for the ride. Here we're seeing a recon position with four soldiers and two jeeps. And this those guys up there on the top, they're the soldiers in a window version of how to handle a recon position where you just stand up on your man-made mound so that everybody could see you're there. Um and they get target acquisition from this uh rocket-assisted. You can see it's launched there. It's a rocket-assisted launch. Um and then Qassam has a number of cameras that follow. They get this one from the side. They're going to have one here where it flies over top. So, they've got multiple camera angles of this. Uh it's a pretty remarkable operation. And then here you see the tracking uh device. If you look below the the crosshairs in the middle, when the soldiers appear uh over the hill, they've come down over the hill after indicating that they were on the hill, you're going to see the target acquisition um crosshairs go. Maybe we can show that again. But, you can um you see it cuts out just before uh it lands. We don't get the result of it. But, this is a 20-kilo explosive-laden drone. And you can see the impact of the explosion um sending smoke up higher than that mound um that we can see from the other angle. It's a pretty massive mound. Um so, we didn't get It's difficult to match the exact casualties up all the time. Israel delays the release of these casualties and makes it difficult to do exact cross-references of it. Um it did look a little bit like it was going to miss hitting directly. Um the video cuts out. Uh but, the shrapnel from the explosion, if if you're just in the area of that going off, um here you can see him uh setting the camera in a 3D casing, which is interesting. It's possible that this drone was assembled um during the battle. We don't have confirmation. There's the soldiers in a window. Do you just stand up at the top of your berm so that every person in the Gaza Strip can see that you're there? Um and they pay the price for it. These guys pay the price for the stupidity. tactical uh obliviousness, I guess. I don't know if that's a term. Tactical obliviousness. They've been doing it all throughout the war. Um and so these were used on October 7th. I've talked about that in previous shows. Um part of the blinding and breaching operation had diversionary fire. They fired more than three dozen of these Zuwari drones. They're named after Muhammad Zuwari. He was the Tunisian uh founder of the drone program. He was assassinated by Israel by Mossad in Tunisia um in 2016 and there's a monument to the drones that he built and to him in Rafa. So this is the Rafa Brigade hitting uh hitting the Israeli military with a Zuwari drone in the in the town uh that Zuwari's monument is in and where his family was from. So um there's rich symbolism of that attack and just another qualitative attack after people believed that uh all eyes were going to move to Jabalia. Uh the Rafa Brigades um said hold on a sec, we have a couple more operations. So I wanted to bring you that. Number three is uh Saraya al-Quds released a mixtape. Uh sniper mixtape here and on the back wall you see there uh it's a Ziyad Nakala quote. It's the he's the leader. He's the founder of Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. And he gave that quote at at a meeting um and it said let us go to pray. Let us go to fight like we go to prayer. Um sort of like duty fulfillment he talked about. And now those fighters, we can loop it around one more time tomorrow so we can we show you that. So so Nakala says that, let us go to fight like we go to prayer. And Saraya al-Quds writes on the wall, we will go to fight as we go to prayer. Having a direct conversation with their leadership. Something from years ago, and they put that up on the wall. They only show it for half a second, um but it's such a meaningful line. It's obviously a significant line to There you see it on the wall. Um to Islamic Jihad. Um and just Yeah, that's perfect. Thanks, Tamara. just the the communication is something that I brought to you guys all through this war. The way that the fighters, the rank and file fighters are communicating with their leaders, historic leaders, active leaders, um placing themselves, positioning themselves within the historic trajectory of the national liberation struggle, um and doing it just as simple as having a marker on the wall in their sniper position. So, this is a sniper mixtape. I had to cut out all of the uh 15 sniper hits that you see in this video. You can go to my Twitter if you want to see the full video. Um but it's a remarkable uh collection of sniper attacks that we have shown all on the show, uh edited on uh throughout this year. And Saraya al-Quds on the October 7th anniversary a couple weeks ago, they said that they're they have carried out 50 sniper operations, and they released 2,000 military communiques um to do that. So, just wanted to bring you that one to connect the history uh and the significance of these fighters communicating with their leadership. I think that's a really uh important part of that we have seen all throughout this war, um and it's remarkable cuz it takes place in every corner of the battle. Um and those guys don't know that that video is being made. Um They just shoot it, and it gets sent um to their uh to the next level to figure out how how it gets processed and published. Um so, they're not they're not putting that up there as um that's that's in their own base. That's what their their graffiti, their message to the world uh in their position um is a significant one for Islamic Jihad and their leader. So, that was Southern Gaza.