Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
- Hamas killed 21 Israeli soldiers with a single RPG shot on Monday, an IDF spokesperson said.
- The shot likely set off explosives the IDF soldiers had laid, the official said, causing a bigger blast.
- That caused two buildings to collapse on about two dozen soldiers, he said.
Hamas inflicted a huge loss on Israel on Monday, killing 21 soldiers with a single rocket-propelled grenade, according to an Israeli official.
Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, made the statement in a televised address shared by i24News on Tuesday.
He said Hamas militants launched an RPG at a tank at about 4 p.m. local time Monday in central Gaza, close to the border community of Kissufim.
That likely set off a large explosion of the IDF's own munitions, collapsing two buildings onto the roughly two-dozen soldiers who died, per a translation provided by The Times of Israel.
Hagari said that the IDF laid explosives in the buildings, intending to withdraw to a safe distance before detonating them. But the RPG attack hit first.
"The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them," he added, per the newspaper.
An IDF spokesperson confirmed that narrative to Business Insider.
In a separate video shared on the IDF's Telegram channel, Hagari said a research-and-rescue unit later scrambled to the scene and recovered the soldiers' bodies.
As well as those 21 deaths, three further IDF soldiers were killed Monday, Israel said.
Those 24 deaths would constitute the single biggest Israeli death toll in a single day of the current conflict, according to Reuters.
Around 550 IDF soldiers have died since Hamas' terror attacks on Israel on October 7, per the IDF website.
Hagari has since been publishing the names of the dead soldiers after notifying their families.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Isaac Herzog, Israel's president, said it had been an "unbearably difficult morning," per a translation provided by The Times of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF experienced "one of the most difficult days" since the start of the three-month siege of Gaza, per Reuters.
"In the name of our heroes, for the sake of our lives, we will not stop fighting until absolute victory," he added.
More than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war as of Sunday, the Associated Press reported, citing the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.