Retooled Hamas Bloodies Israel With Help From Hezbollah
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Hoisting themselves from a tunnel underneath the Gaza border, the Hamas gunmen sprinted through desert brush to attack an Israeli military post and kill five soldiers, retreating with a bounty of captured machine-guns.
The strike at Israel’s border with Gaza at Nahal Oz, recorded by a militant and broadcast on the group’s television station, demonstrates how Hamas’s one-time ragtag Al-Qassam Brigades militia has transformed itself into a disciplined force and inflicted greater damage on Israel’s vastly larger army than ever before. Sixty-four soldiers died, the most in a military conflict since the second Lebanon war in 2006, and more than six times the number of troops killed in Israel’s last ground war in Gaza in 2009.