Spain's last great armada — a fleet carrying an army to Flanders — sheltered in English neutral waters in the Downs. Tromp blockaded it, waited for the fog, and then went in and destroyed it regardless of English neutrality, with the English fleet watching, unable to intervene. Over forty Spanish ships were sunk, burned, or taken.
The end of Spain as a naval power and the arrival of the Dutch as the greatest one. The Spanish Road to Flanders was already closed by land and now the sea route was gone too — the Army of Flanders could no longer be reinforced at all, and the Netherlands were effectively lost. It also displayed Tromp's line-ahead tactics, which the English took careful notes on and used against him a decade later.
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Rafah Junction was the gateway between the Gaza Strip and Sinai — a heavily fortified Egyptian position protecting the northern coastal road. Israeli forces attacked with infantry and armor in a night assault on October 31, fighting through minefields and wire obstacles against determined Egyptian resistance. The battle lasted through the night and into the next day before Egyptian defenses crumbled. The fall of Rafah sealed off the Gaza Strip and opened the coastal road toward the Canal Zone, allowing Israeli forces to sweep westward.
The capture of Rafah cut off Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and demonstrated Israel's ability to conduct sustained night combat. The northern coastal route through Rafah became the main Israeli axis of advance toward the Canal, with subsequent Israeli columns covering the remaining distance to the Canal in less than 24 hours. The speed of exploitation after Rafah shocked Egyptian commanders.
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British and French aircraft — flying from Cyprus and aircraft carriers including HMS Eagle — opened Operation Musketeer with a massive campaign to destroy the Egyptian Air Force. Targeting airfields around Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, and the Canal Zone, Anglo-French bombers and fighter-bombers struck systematically over five days. The Egyptians, warned by Israeli radio intercepts that an attack was imminent, had dispersed some aircraft — but the campaign still eliminated Egypt's operational air capability. Nasser's response was to order 47 ships sunk in the Suez Canal, blocking it to all traffic.
The air campaign demonstrated overwhelming Anglo-French air superiority but also the limits of airpower alone. Nasser's decision to block the Canal — transforming Egypt's military defeat into a political weapon — proved strategically brilliant. The blocked Canal hurt European economies more than Egyptian ones, strengthening the economic case for a ceasefire. The campaign also demonstrated that even total air dominance cannot achieve political objectives when the political framework has shifted.
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Jabalia, the largest refugee camp in Gaza with 110,000 residents, became one of the most contested battlegrounds of the war. On October 31, an IDF airstrike targeting Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari collapsed several buildings in the camp, killing Biari and an estimated 50–100 others. The resulting images of mass casualties caused international shock. The subsequent ground fight through Jabalia was conducted in some of the most densely built urban terrain on earth. Hamas fighters exploited the camp's labyrinthine alleys and interconnected tunnel network. Israeli forces returned to Jabalia in multiple distinct operations as Hamas re-infiltrated areas declared cleared.
Jabalia encapsulated the central dilemma of the war: Hamas's command infrastructure was deliberately embedded among densely packed civilians, making effective targeting impossible without civilian casualties. The repeated re-infiltration cycle — IDF clears, Hamas returns — demonstrated the limits of military operations without political settlement.
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