May – August 2025 · Southern and central Gaza Theater
May – August 2025
Launched in May 2025, Operation Gideon's Chariots was intended to seize and hold territory rather than raid and withdraw — the pattern of the previous eighteen months, in which the IDF had repeatedly cleared areas of Gaza and then returned to fight in them again. It pushed through Khan Younis and the central Strip, displacing populations that had already been displaced five and six times, and compressed most of Gaza's 2 million people into a shrinking coastal strip. Aid restrictions through this period produced the conditions the IPC would formally classify as famine in August.
Commanders