A joint operation by the Israeli military, the domestic Shin Bet security service and the Special Police Unit in Rafah freed Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Hare, 70, the military said.
The two men were kidnapped by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on Oct. 7, the military said, among some 250 people who Israel says were seized during the militant raid that triggered its war on Gaza.
“We’ve been working a long time on this operation,” Israeli military spokesman Lt Col. Richard Hecht said. “We were waiting for the right conditions.”
The Argentinian government thanked Israel for the rescue of the two men, who it said were dual nationals of Argentina.
Israel’s military said its air strikes had coincided with the raid to allow its forces to be extracted.
The Gaza health ministry said 67 people had been killed and the number could rise as rescue operations were under way. A photograph from the scene showed a vast area of rubble where buildings had been destroyed.
Palestinians in Rafah said two mosques and several houses were hit in more than an hour of strikes by Israeli warplanes, tanks and ships, causing widespread panic among people who had been asleep.
“It was the worst night since we arrived in Rafah last month. Death was so near as shells and missiles landed 200 meters from our tent camp,” said Gaza businessman Emad, a father of six, told Reuters using a chat app.
Some feared Israel had begun a long-feared ground offensive in the city, where more than a million people displaced by Israel’s war on Hamas are sheltering with nowhere else to go.
“Everyone said it was a surprise ground attack. My family and I said our last prayers,” Emad said.
A relative of one of the hostages said he had seen both freed men in hospital and found them “a bit frail, a bit thin, a bit pale” but overall in good condition.
Idan Bejerano, son-in-law of Hare, said that the hostages had both been sleeping when “within a minute” the commandos were in the building and covering them as they fought the captors.
They were being treated in Israel’s Sheba hospital, its director Prof Arnon Afek said.
Hamas said the attack on Rafah was a continuation of a “genocidal war” and forced displacement attempts Israel has waged against the Palestinian people.
Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted at least 250 in their Oct. 7 incursion, according to Israeli tallies. Israel has responded with a military assault on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the enclave.
US President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday that Israel should not start a military operation in Rafah without a credible plan to ensure the safety of the roughly 1 million people sheltering there, the White House said.
Aid agencies say an assault on Rafah would be catastrophic. It is the last relatively safe place in an enclave devastated by Israel’s military offensive.
Egypt has reinforced its border with the city, saying it fears Gazans will be pushed across, never to return.
An Israeli official has said people will be evacuated further north but its forces are also active in central Gaza. Palestinian medics said 15 people had been killed in an airstrike in the central town of Deir Al-Balah.
Palestinian father Emad said the world needed to act.
“The whole world condemned Israel’s plans to invade Rafah. They are destroying the city before they invade it, how is the world doing now? Only concerned?” he said.
Biden and Netanyahu spoke for about 45 minutes, days after the US leader said Israel’s military response in the Gaza Strip had been “over the top” and expressed grave concern over the rising civilian death toll in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s office has said it had ordered the military to develop a plan to evacuate Rafah and destroy four Hamas battalions it says are deployed there.
Netanyahu said in an interview aired on Sunday that “enough” of the 132 remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza were alive to justify Israel’s war in the region.
Hamas-run Aqsa Television on Sunday quoted a senior Hamas leader as saying any Israeli ground offensive in Rafah would “blow up” the hostage-exchange negotiations.
Egypt warned on Sunday of “dire consequences” of a potential Israeli military assault on Rafah.
“Egypt called for the necessity of uniting all international and regional efforts to prevent the targeting of the Palestinian city of Rafah,” its foreign ministry said in a statement.
Hamas warned Israel on Sunday that a ground offensive in Rafah, crowded with displaced Gazans, would imperil future hostage releases, while US President Joe Biden urged the protection of civilians in the besieged territory.
Foreign governments, including Israel’s key ally the United States, and aid groups have voiced deep concern over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to extend operations into the far-southern Gaza city.
Rafah, on the border with Egypt, has remained the last refuge for Palestinians fleeing Israel’s relentless bombardment elsewhere in the Gaza Strip in its four-month war against Hamas, triggered by the group’s October 7 attack.
“Any attack by the occupation army on the city of Rafah would torpedo the exchange negotiations,” a Hamas leader told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Netanyahu has told troops to prepare to enter the city which now hosts more than half of Gaza’s total population, spurring concern about the impact on displaced civilians.
Biden spoke to Netanyahu on the phone Sunday and told him the Gaza advance should not go ahead in the absence of a “credible” plan to ensure “the safety” of people sheltering there, the White House said.
Some 1.4 million Palestinians have crowded into Rafah, with many living in tents while food, water and medicine are becoming increasingly scarce.
Netanyahu had told US broadcaster ABC News the Rafah operation would go ahead until Hamas is eliminated, adding he would provide “safe passage” to civilians wishing to leave.
When pressed about where they could go, Netanyahu said: “You know, the areas that we’ve cleared north of Rafah, plenty of areas there. But, we are working out a detailed plan.”
Mediators held new talks in Cairo for a pause in the fighting and the release of some of the 132 hostages Israel says are still in Gaza, including 29 thought to be dead.
Hamas seized some 250 hostages on October 7, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures. Dozens were released during a one-week truce in November.
Hamas’s military wing on Sunday said two hostages had been killed and eight others seriously wounded in Israeli bombardment in recent days, a claim AFP is unable to independently verify.
Netanyahu has faced calls for early elections and mounting protests over his administration’s failure to bring home the hostages.
Israeli strikes have long hit targets in Rafah, and combat on Sunday seemed intense several kilometers (miles) to the north in Khan Yunis city. AFP correspondents heard repeated explosions and saw plumes of black smoke.
Israel’s military said troops were conducting “targeted raids” in the west of Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city, while Hamas reported violent clashes and said air strikes also hit Rafah.
Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel has responded with a relentless offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip that the territory’s health ministry says has killed at least 28,176 people, mostly women and children.
Hamas said dozens of bodies had been found in Gaza City, in the coastal strip’s north, after Israeli ground troops withdrew from the area.
Most of them “were martyred by bullets of snipers,” the group said in a statement.
Hossam Al-Sharqawi of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told reporters that “every day our ambulance guys (in Gaza) are martyred or injured.”
“This is unacceptable, this madness must stop.”
During a visit to a military base Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel aims for “the demilitarization of Gaza.”
“This requires our security control... over the entire area west of Jordan, including the Gaza Strip,” he said.
The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) were some of the latest to raise the alarm over the plan for Rafah, Gaza’s last major population center that Israeli troops have yet to enter.
“The OIC strongly warned that the continuation and expansion of the Israeli military aggression is part of rejected attempts to forcibly expel the Palestinian people from their land,” the 57-nation Jeddah-based bloc said on social media.
It stressed “that such acts fall under genocide and would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and collective massacre.”
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also rejected “forced” displacement of people from Rafah, evoking the trauma of Palestinians’ mass exodus and forced displacement around the time of Israel’s creation in 1948.
Riyadh called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting, while Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the priority “must be an immediate pause in the fighting to get aid in and hostages out.”
Denouncing a “genocide” in Gaza, thousands rallied Sunday in Morocco’s capital Rabat and called on their government to undo a 2020 normalization pact with Israel.
Gazans, driven further and further south, have repeatedly said they can find no safe refuge from the fighting and bombing.
Farah Muhammad, 39, a mother of five displaced to Rafah from northern Gaza, said she felt helpless.“There is no place to escape.”
Australian Senator David Shoebridge has decried the bombardment on Rafah and questioned the timing while viewers in the United States watch the Super Bowl.
“The attack on Rafah happening at 2am Gaza time while the US is watching the Superbowl is utterly horrific and devastating,” Shoebridge said in a post on X.
“Our hearts are with the Palestinian people now more than ever,” he added.
Shoebridge is a member of the Australian Greens who have called for a ceasefire in Gaza and questioned Australia’s role in exporting weapons to Israel.
