New footage of the IDF’s Operation Arnon was released Sunday to mark two years since the raid that freed four hostages from Hamas captivity in central Gaza, one of the most dramatic rescue missions of the war.

The hostages, Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan and Andrey Kozlov, were brought home on June 8, 2024. All four had been abducted from the Nova music festival near Re’im during the October 7 massacre and were rescued after 246 days in Hamas captivity.

The newly declassified footage, released by the Israel Police’s Yamam counterterrorism unit, documents the moments in which officers simultaneously stormed two separate compounds where the hostages were being held, breached the buildings, located the captives and confirmed over the radio that they had been secured. The video shows the unit arriving at both locations at once, rescuing the hostages and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Hamas’s Nukhba force until the operation was complete.

The two sites sat close together but were assaulted as independent targets. Argamani was held in one building, while Meir Jan, Kozlov and Ziv were held in an apartment in another, the two roughly 200 meters apart.

The simultaneous timing was chosen so that Hamas guards at the second location would not kill the three men if they heard a nearby raid and assumed they were under attack.

The operation had been planned for months before June 2024 but was delayed several times to sharpen intelligence on the hostages’ whereabouts and the risks involved. At one stage the mission was meant to rescue only Argamani, before commanders decided on the riskier simultaneous raid on both locations.

Officials have said the rescue was aided by the fact that the hostages were being held in civilian apartments above ground rather than in the tunnels where many other captives were kept.

A Yamam team commander described reaching Argamani within minutes of breaching. “The force entered, eliminated the terrorists inside and rescued Noa within a short time,” he said in remarks accompanying the footage. Officers carried the frightened 26-year-old out under fire, reassuring her that she was safe and that they were taking her home.

Argamani’s rescue went relatively smoothly given the circumstances, but a major gun battle erupted at the home where the three men were held, and during the firefight Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora was critically wounded by Hamas fire and later died. The operation was subsequently renamed in his honor. Israel later said the Hamas operative behind Zamora’s killing was eliminated in a follow-up IDF and Shin Bet operation.

The four freed hostages have since become public figures in the campaign to bring home those still held in Gaza. Argamani, freed after eight months in captivity, has become one of the most vocal activists for the hostages’ release and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2025.

Operation Arnon remains one of only a handful of successful military rescues of living hostages since the start of the war.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)