The 504th unit’s fighters, field investigators, and facility investigators led the unit’s main effort from the start of combat. During the conduct of the fighting in the settlements, dozens of fighters and field researchers joined the organic battalions with the aim of eliminating terrorists, helping to evacuate the residents from the area and deepening the findings emerging from the field. At the same time, a temporary field facility was opened in the southern area to conduct investigations in real time, which became a permanent facility for investigations within a few days.
As part of the terrorist investigations that have been going on since the start of the fighting, 300 terrorists from all the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip were interrogated and they gave the locations of underground terrorist tunnels, warehouses and weapons, along with exposing the enemy’s methods of operation, and the enemy’s assimilation efforts within the civilian population. Throughout the fighting, the unit’s intelligence collection and influence center operates, which operates with a wide variety of tools and methods for four main goals: maneuver support, intelligence to incriminate targets, influence and leadership of the effort to evacuate the population south of the Gaza Strip.
As part of the effort to evacuate the civilian population from the northern Gaza Strip, the unit operated a variety of operational tools with the help of which it made over 30,000 calls in a short time, sent over ten million text messages, sent over nine million recorded messages, as well as scattered about four million flyers and leaflets from the air and land calling on the population to evacuate. The evacuation effort allows the IDF to broadly attack Hamas infrastructure in the area. Using accurate human intelligence provided by Unit 504, over 300 new enemy detections in the Gaza Strip were committed and over 100 targets were attacked as part of the target production effort.
A senior official in Unit 504 of the Intelligence Division said: “We received thousands of phone calls from collaborators, on a scale never before seen in the unit. It is evident that the residents of the Gaza Strip are not satisfied with the barbaric conduct of Hamas, the ordinary citizen understands that Hamas is bringing a disaster on the residents of Gaza that will be difficult for them to recover from. The field investigators of the unit jumped on 7.10 and joined the fighting forces in the surrounding areas, thus constituting a reliable primary source for the plans of the terrorist organization Hamas. So far, we have arrested over 300 terrorists from the terrorist organizations during the ground maneuver who were taken for further investigation in Israeli territory. Each and every investigation leads to the incrimination of new locations and the human intelligence that emerges from the Gaza Strip and the interrogations of the captives in collaboration with the Shin Bet, is an inseparable layer of the complete intelligence picture. The information that emerges in the interrogations of the captives is very valuable, it leads to the killing of activists and the preservation of the security of our forces.”


Photo: IDF spokesman
Photo: IDF spokesman
Photo: IDF spokesman