For the past three weeks, the Israel Defense Forces’ 7th Armored Brigade combat team has been fighting on the outskirts of Gaza City to defeat Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion.

Many IDF brigades are operating in Gaza, but it’s hard to find one for which the fight is more personal. Six of the 48 hostages still in Gaza are in the 7th Armored Brigade. Two of them are still alive — Matan Angrest and Nimrod Cohen — and four have been killed — Omer Neutra, Daniel Perez, Itay Chen, and Oz Daniel.

If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the troops should have an easy time carrying out this operation — after all, they’ve done this before. This is the seventh time Israeli forces have attacked the neighborhood since the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.

Only weeks after the Hamas invasion, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office released footage of the 36th Division fighting “to defeat Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion, one of the organization’s main battalions.”

“The 50th Battalion of the Nahal Brigade defeated the Zeitoun Battalion in the heart of Gaza City,” read (Hebrew link) a subsequent article in February 2024.

“There are terrorists here and even when we leave, there will be terrorists, but they will be few. Their ability to create command and control is very low,” the IDF battalion commander said at the time.

If those previous efforts had been as successful as some claimed, Israeli troops wouldn’t need to keep coming back.

The very fact that the IDF has to keep returning to areas in which it has already operated underlines how complex the challenge is — and perhaps, how misguided the Israeli approach was in the earlier chapters of the country’s longest war.

Today, after enjoying almost 10 months without having to face a concerted IDF maneuver, the Zeitoun Battalion stands at over 400 fighters. It has developed considerable skill at planting explosives, using unexploded IDF munitions to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that can destroy Merkava tanks. The troops of the 7th Brigade found seven such massive IEDs on a road next to the compound in which Brigade Commander Colonel “Shin” — who per IDF regulations can be named only by his first Hebrew initial — set up his headquarters.

Israeli intelligence believes that the Hamas battalion is under the impression that, since it still exists in force, it has defeated the IDF in each of the six previous times Israeli forces operated in the dense neighborhood.

Officers in........

© The Times of Israel