Four Israeli soldiers were killed and six others were injured on Monday in an explosion in a building in the south of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Army reported this Tuesday.
The four soldiers belonged to the Girati brigade and, according to The Times of Israel, two of the dead, both aged 19, were undergoing training.
They all died inside a building full of explosives, in the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
According to The Times of Israel, soldiers found the entrance to a tunnel in the building that they believed to be the home of a Hamas fighter.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, at least 299 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Palestinian enclave.
The ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip was triggered by the attack by the Islamist group Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023, which caused around 1,200 deaths and two hundred hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
Since then, Tel Aviv has launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip that has so far caused more than 36,500 deaths and 82,000 injuries according to Hamas, classified as a “terrorist organization” by Israel, the European Union and U.S.
It is estimated that 10,000 Palestinians remain buried in the rubble after around eight months of war, which is also triggering a serious humanitarian crisis.
The conflict has also caused nearly two million people to be displaced, plunging the overpopulated and poor Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a “situation of catastrophic hunger” that is causing victims – “the highest number ever recorded” by the UN in studies on food security in the world.
