Operation Arnon: the Nuseirat hostage rescue (2024)

At about 11 on the morning of Saturday, June 8, 2024, Israeli special forces raided two residential buildings some 200 meters apart in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza and brought out four hostages alive: Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, all abducted from the Nova music festival eight months earlier. It was the largest rescue of living hostages in the Israel and Hamas war. One Israeli officer was killed, and the operation, first called Seeds of Summer, was renamed Operation Arnon in his memory. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, more than 270 Palestinians were killed during the raid and the fighting around it; the IDF put the number of Palestinian casualties at under 100.

Hostages in a crowded camp

Nuseirat, one of the refugee camps founded in central Gaza after 1948, was packed with displaced people by mid-2024. Israeli troops had not conducted ground operations inside it. The four hostages had been seized at the Nova festival on October 7, 2023; Argamani's abduction on the back of a motorcycle, filmed by her captors, had become one of the best-known images of the attack. Israel's intelligence services, the Shin Bet and the IDF's intelligence directorate, located Argamani in one apartment and the three men in another, held in the home of a local family.

By June 2024 the war's only earlier rescues of living hostages had been the release of a soldier, Ori Megidish, in October 2023 and the rescue of two men from Rafah on February 12, 2024. Negotiations for a broader deal had stalled.

The raid

The rescue was carried out by the Israel Police's counterterrorism unit, Yamam, with the Shin Bet and IDF forces, after weeks of preparation. The teams struck both buildings at the same time in daylight. Argamani was taken out quickly; at the second building the force came under fire, and Chief Inspector Arnon Zmora, a Yamam team commander, was mortally wounded. A vehicle carrying the three men broke down under fire and the force had to fight its way out, while the IDF struck around the area with air and ground fire to cover the extraction. The hostages were flown out by helicopter from the coast.

Outcome and significance

The four were taken to Sheba Medical Center, where scenes of their reunions with their families were broadcast across Israel. Argamani's mother, who was terminally ill, was able to see her daughter before she died a few weeks later.

The Palestinian toll made the operation one of the most disputed of the war. The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 274 people were killed, many of them women and children, and hundreds wounded; Israel said the number was much lower, that the fighting was forced on its troops by gunmen in a densely populated area, and that Hamas bore responsibility for holding hostages in family homes. The UN human rights office said on June 11, 2024 that both the Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups might have committed war crimes, by the way the raid was carried out and by holding hostages among civilians. US officials denied reports that the US-built aid pier off Gaza had been used in the operation, saying a helicopter had landed nearby but outside the pier area. The rescue showed what intelligence and special forces could achieve, but it also showed its limits: most of the hostages who came home in the months that followed were freed through ceasefire deals, not by force.