IDF kills senior Hamas commander

Wissam Farhat was behind several of the October 7 attacks as well as one of the deadliest attacks on soldiers in 2014’s Protective Edge operation.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF announced Saturday the elimination of a senior Hamas terrorist in the Gaza Strip.

Using precise information supplied by Military Intelligence and the Shabak, the air force struck the house Wissam Farhat was in with missiles, killing him.

Farhat was the commander of Hamas’ Shujayya Battalion, said IDF chief spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

He “planned and sent terrorists on October 7 to the Nachal Oz kibbutz and army post,” said Hagari, where a “cruel massacre” took place of dozens of kibbutz members and soldiers, and dozens more were abducted back into the Gaza Strip by the terror organization’s elite Nukhba troops.

In total, Hamas took over 240 hostages. After last week’s series of hostages-for-Palestinian prisoner exchanges, the IDF estimates that 137 are still in the hands of Hamas and other terror organizations in Gaza.

Farhat had led the battalion since 2010. During the IDF’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, he commanded the terrorists who blew up an armored personnel carrier, killing six Israeli soldiers in one of the deadliest attacks of that round of fighting between the IDF and Hamas.

His men also managed to spirit away the body of one of them, St. Sgt. Oron Shaul, which Hamas has never returned.

Further back in his terror past, he had directed the terror attack on the pre-military academy in Atzmona in 2002 in which a lone gunman infiltrated the facility and murdered five students using grenades and a rifle. Another 23 people were injured, some seriously.

Farhat had seemingly begun his “career” as a wannabe suicide terrorist. He was caught by Israel’s security forces in 1995 on his way to commit an attack, and spent the next several years in prison. When he was released, he helped produce Hamas’ rocket arsenal before rising in the ranks.

The IDF has successfully concentrated many resources in trying to find and liquidate all those who took part in the surprise attack on over 20 Gaza envelope communities, in which a total of 1,200 people were slaughtered, including the elderly and infants.

“We will continue to chase every single one of the October 7 terrorists,” said Hagari, “and we will eliminate them.”

Special attention has been paid to the Nukhba force, as its men took the lead in many of the massacres, and the IDF has killed many of its senior echelon since it invaded the Gaza Strip in late October.