'Iron Footprints' stumble: Israel loses 3 forces in northern Gaza
Iran Press TV
Tuesday, 15 July 2025 6:40 AM
As many as three troopers from an Israeli armored brigade known for its ferocious war tactics have been killed in the northern Gaza Strip, reportedly under heavy anti-tank fire from the Palestinian territory's resistance fighters.
The Israeli military reported the fatalities in a statement on Monday. The Israeli regime's Maariv newspaper referred to the location of the incident as the city of Jabalia.
A fourth trooper was also "seriously wounded" during the incident, the military added, citing "an explosion involving an Israeli tank" as the likely cause of the casualties.
The statement added that the tank had "caught fire" after the incident, suggesting that the casualties might have been caused as a result of the troops getting trapped inside the vehicle.
It has, meanwhile, not ruled out either a roadside explosion or a "technical failure" as other likely causes.
The blaze was, however, so intense that the Israeli regime was forced to dispatch firefighters to put it out.
Maariv, meanwhile, confirmed that the forces were riding one of the military's Merkava Mark 4 tanks that Tel Aviv boasts is "the best and most protected tank in the world."
The military identified the fatalities as Staff Sergeant Shoham Menahem, Sergeant Shlomo Yakir Shrem, and Sergeant Yuliy Fakto.
According to the statement, the forces belonged to the 401st Armored Brigade, which is also known as the "Iron Footprints" or "Iron Tracks."
The brigade has a drawn-out history of unbridled aggression -- going back as far as the 1960s -- against various West Asian nations. This includes heavy involvement in several wholesale Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon.
Since October 2023, when the regime began its latest genocidal military assault on the coastal sliver, the battalion has likewise been heavily depended upon for deadly rounds of aggression targeting such places as Jabalia and the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Gaza's resistance movements have, for their part, faced the brigade with strong retaliation, including the one that killed the trio, and decisive reprisal against invading Israeli forces in Jabalia in October 2024 that took out the brigade's commander Ehsan Daxa.
The groups had, prior to that, also given the battalion an exceptionally hard time by storming the Zikim area in the western part of the occupied Palestinian territories during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by resistance fighters that led to the capture of hundreds of Israelis.
Also on Monday, various news outlets reported a "very serious" incident in eastern Gaza that prompted the Israeli regime to scramble rescue helicopters to evacuate the forces that had been wounded as a result.
Reporting on the latter development, a correspondent with Qatar's Al Jazeera television network said the regime enacted its controversial "Hannibal Directive" during the incident to allegedly avoid capture of a trooper by resistance fighters.
The directive condones the Israeli military's taking whatever course of action it deems necessary to avoid such captures even if it entails taking the lives of the exposed troopers.
Monday's incidents come less than a week after eight Israeli forces were killed or wounded in southern Gaza in what was hailed by resistance fighters as an operation "shattering" the Israeli regime's myth of invincibility.
On July 4, the armed wing of Gaza's Islamic Jihad resistance movement announced either killing or injuring at least 40 Israeli forces during a complex ambush targeting various groups of the troops in the territory's northern area.
As of June 2025, a total of 893 Israeli forces have reportedly been killed in Gaza during the genocide launched by Israel that began after the al-Aqsa Flood operation. A whopping 449 fatalities were caused after the regime stepped up the genocide by bringing the territory under a no-holds-barred ground operation in May.
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