Shayetet 13

Overview

Shayetet 13 is the naval commando unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Part of the Israeli Navy, it specializes in operations that begin at sea but may continue ashore or involve airborne insertion. Its missions include underwater operations, amphibious assaults, vessel boarding, maritime intelligence gathering, sabotage, counterterrorism and hostage rescue. Its permanent base is at Atlit, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Israel has no separate marine corps; Shayetet 13 provides the navy with a specialized force trained for such missions. The unit’s ability to operate at sea, on land and in the air has made it an important part of Israel’s military response to threats along its coast and beyond it.^[1][11][12]

Maritime access is central to the unit’s work, but its record is broader than naval combat alone. Shayetet 13 has boarded ships carrying weapons, joined other IDF special forces in assaults, fought Hamas attackers inside Israel, and conducted raids during the Gaza war (2023–present). Its training combines infantry skills with diving, marine warfare, operation of specialized vessels, naval assault methods and operational parachuting. Those skills allow commandos to move between ships, shorelines, buildings and other terrain as a mission requires. The unit also works alongside conventional formations, whose armor, infantry and perimeter control can support a focused commando operation.^[11][12]

Shayetet 13’s history illustrates several roles for a naval special operations force. At Green Island in 1969, its commandos led an assault before a supporting Sayeret Matkal force reached the objective. During the Second Intifada, the unit seized a ship involved in a weapons-smuggling plan for Gaza. In 2010, its commandos were the primary boarding force in Israel’s interdiction of a Gaza-bound flotilla. On October 7, 2023, members fought Hamas attackers and rescued hostages. In 2024, the unit operated against Hamas tunnels, weapons and commanders in Gaza. Each episode drew on its capacity to conduct a precise assault while coordinating with other parts of the IDF.^{[4][5][6][16]}

Founding and ideology

The unit grew from the maritime forces that preceded Israel’s establishment. Members of the Palyam, the Palmach’s naval arm, had developed experience in seamanship and maritime sabotage. After the founding of the IDF, veterans of those forces became part of the Israeli Navy and helped build its commando capability. Yohai Ben-Nun and Yosef Dror are identified as founders of Shayetet 13. Its formation took shape in 1949, when separate naval commando capabilities were brought together. The IDF marks January 1, 1950, as the date on which the combined force was formally established under the Shayetet 13 name. The distinction between the earlier formation and the formal date reflects the unit’s gradual development from wartime naval groups into a standing force.^[13]

The name means “Flotilla 13.” The number came from a Palyam custom of raising a toast on the thirteenth day of each month. That link to the Palyam remains part of the unit’s institutional history, although Shayetet 13 became a regular military formation within the Israeli Navy. Its original purpose was practical: Israel needed personnel able to approach targets by water, conduct underwater sabotage and support operations beyond the reach of ordinary naval crews. From those beginnings, its mission expanded to encompass both shipboard and land combat. The IDF describes the unit’s modern work in terms of military operations and national security, rather than a separate political ideology.^[11][13]

Early debate over the place of a dedicated naval commando force affected its size and resources. Nonetheless, the unit developed a distinct combination of diving, small-boat and infantry skills. Its permanent base at Atlit gave it a center for training and operational preparation. The transition from Palyam roots to a standing IDF unit also placed its missions within the navy’s command structure. Shayetet 13 would thereafter be available for naval tasks and for joint operations with ground and other special forces. Its history cannot be understood solely as the history of a diving unit: the ability to fight after reaching a target has been as important as the means of reaching it.^[12][13][18]

History

One of Shayetet 13’s best-known early operations was the assault on Green Island, an Egyptian position in the Red Sea, during the War of Attrition in July 1969. A naval commando force approached through the water and attacked the island, while Sayeret Matkal was assigned to follow after the commandos secured a beachhead. The opening fight proved difficult: some weapons and ammunition had been affected by the long swim, and Egyptian defenders resisted. The naval commandos continued the assault. After 17 minutes they had taken much of the island, before the Sayeret Matkal force arrived. The operation showed both the value and the hazards of using underwater approach to put a small force directly onto a defended target.^[16]

Green Island also demonstrated the unit’s relationship with other IDF special forces. Shayetet 13’s task was to gain access and establish the initial position; Sayeret Matkal was to reinforce and continue the assault. The delay in the supporting force’s arrival required the naval commandos to fight for ground beyond the opening beachhead. Several commandos were wounded, and the operation became a notable episode in Israeli naval commando history. Its significance lies in the sequence of the attack: swimmers reached the island, engaged its defenders and held enough ground for a second force to join them. The mission was amphibious in method but depended on sustained infantry combat once the commandos were ashore.^[16]

The unit later took part in operations against weapons transfers by sea. During the Second Intifada, Israeli intelligence uncovered a plan to smuggle weapons for Gaza aboard the Karine A. Shayetet 13 seized the ship in the Red Sea and captured its cargo. The operation used a different part of the unit’s skill set from Green Island: commandos had to reach and take control of a vessel, then secure what it carried. It showed how maritime interdiction could prevent weapons from reaching armed groups before those weapons entered a conflict area. Other ship seizures followed, making vessel boarding an enduring element of the unit’s work.^[18]

Shayetet 13 also served in wider IDF campaigns. During the Second Intifada, its personnel undertook operations on land as well as at sea. In the 2006 Lebanon War, naval commandos carried out a raid near Tyre against Hezbollah, a terrorist organization. These operations extended the unit’s activity beyond underwater sabotage and ship interdiction. They required intelligence, insertion, close combat and withdrawal under conditions different from those of conventional naval warfare. The breadth of those missions helps explain why the unit’s personnel have moved into senior command and other IDF posts: training and service in Shayetet 13 expose officers to both independent special operations and coordination with larger formations.^[3][18]

Structure and leadership

Shayetet 13 belongs to the Israeli Navy and operates within the IDF chain of command. Its Atlit base is the permanent home of the unit. Training joins long infantry preparation with diving, marine warfare, specialized vessels, counterterrorism, guerrilla warfare, parachuting and naval assault. The resulting force can be deployed by sea or air and can continue fighting on land. Public accounts identify its mission and some commanders, while operational details of many missions are kept confidential. This structure permits the navy to assign commandos to a ship seizure, an amphibious raid or a joint ground operation without treating each as a separate service.^[11][12][18]

Yoav Gallant is a former Shayetet 13 member and commander. He began his military career as a naval commando in 1977. After six years in the unit, he worked as a lumberjack in Alaska during the 1980s, then returned to the Israeli Navy, served on a missile boat and received another assignment in Shayetet 13. Navy commander Ami Ayalon earmarked him to command the unit in 1992. Gallant subsequently led Shayetet 13 for three years, then took command of the IDF’s Gaza Division. He later commanded Southern Command. His career illustrates a path from naval special operations to leadership of larger ground formations.^[5][10]

Other personnel have carried the unit’s experience into senior public-facing roles. A former Shayetet 13 commando who joined the IDF in 1995 later became an IDF spokesperson. He took part in operations during the Second Intifada, served in other units and returned to Shayetet 13 as a deputy commander before taking that later post. Shayetet 13 also appears among the originating units represented in a study of senior IDF officers appointed since the late 1970s. The study considered officers selected for posts including chief of staff, heads of military intelligence and regional commands. That record places the naval commandos among the formations from which Israel has drawn senior military leadership.^[3][4]

Attacks and operations

In 2010, Shayetet 13 served as the Israeli Navy’s primary boarding force during the interdiction of a flotilla bound for Gaza. The commandos were assigned to board its vessels and escort them to Ashdod as part of Israel’s maritime security operation. Naval personnel conducted boarding rehearsals beforehand. Israeli intelligence identified a radical element aboard the Mavi Marmara, and the navy concentrated its attention on that ship. The operation required commandos to take control of vessels carrying civilian passengers, a mission that differed from assaulting an enemy military position or intercepting a weapons ship. Preparation for resistance did not match the violence the first boarding force encountered.^[6][9]

Commandos boarded with paintball rifles for crowd control and handguns reserved for life-threatening situations. Activists on the Mavi Marmara resisted with bats, knives and slingshots; Israeli naval accounts also reported rifles. The boarding force had anticipated resistance but was unprepared for the deadly confrontation that developed. The equipment carried by the commandos and the nature of the resistance are essential to understanding the encounter. Shayetet 13 was enforcing Israel’s maritime security restrictions, while violence aboard the ship turned the boarding into a close-quarters fight. The episode became one of the unit’s most publicly scrutinized operations because the confrontation occurred on a civilian flotilla rather than on a conventional battlefield.^[6][9]

The Mavi Marmara operation also exposed a problem in planning an interdiction when organizers might seek confrontation. The navy knew of a radical element aboard the vessel and had rehearsed boarding, yet its commandos were prepared principally for crowd control and resistance short of deadly combat. Once the boarding began, those assumptions failed. The account of the encounter does not require treating every person aboard as an attacker: it identifies the violent resistance that confronted the boarding force. It also separates the reason for the operation, enforcement of maritime security, from the tactical conditions on the ship. Both are necessary to explain why a planned escort to Ashdod became a deadly incident.^[6][9]

Shayetet 13 played a direct combat role during the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023. Hamas naval forces infiltrated Israel, and the Israeli Navy fought attackers approaching by sea. Shayetet 13 captured Muhammad Abu Ghali, deputy commander of the southern division of Hamas’s naval force. Commandos were also airlifted to the Gaza border, where they fought Hamas attackers on land. During those battles, unit members killed more than 60 attackers, captured 26 and rescued about 250 hostages. Two Shayetet 13 members were killed. The figures describe the unit’s fighting and rescues near Gaza during the attacks, when its naval commandos were urgently deployed as a ground combat force.^[5]

The October 7 response brought together several parts of Shayetet 13’s remit. Capturing a senior member of Hamas’s naval force was connected to the navy’s maritime defense mission. Airlifting commandos to the border, engaging attackers and rescuing hostages required land combat and rapid coordination during an unfolding assault. The unit’s participation therefore extended beyond protecting the coast. Its casualties also show the danger faced by commandos in the fighting. The subsequent Gaza war drew the unit into sustained operations against Hamas, a terrorist organization, alongside other IDF units. Those missions included searches for tunnel entrances and weapons, as well as targeted combat in dense urban areas.^[5][11]

In early January 2024, the IDF released details of a Shayetet 13 raid on a Hamas site in central Gaza. Commandos found several shafts leading to a tunnel network extending hundreds of meters. They also discovered a weapons cache containing mortars, grenades and rocket-propelled grenade missiles. The operation connected surface searches with Hamas’s underground infrastructure: finding an entrance revealed a larger network than the visible site alone. Weapons recovered at the location showed the military use of the area. The raid was part of the unit’s work in the Gaza war against Hamas tunnels and arms stores, tasks that relied on close searches as well as combat capability.^[7]

In March 2024, Shayetet 13 took part in an IDF operation at Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Ra’ad Thabet, a senior Hamas commander, was killed as he tried to flee into the hospital courtyard with two other terrorists. He had headed supply and manpower for Hamas’s military wing and had previously led its production unit. Shayetet 13 soldiers operated with the Shaked Battalion, Duvdevan and the Nahal Reconnaissance Battalion. During fighting near Shifa Hospital, Shayetet 13 and accompanying IDF troops found weapons and terrorist infrastructure. The unit continued targeted fighting in the area alongside the 401st Armored Brigade and Nahal Brigade. Its role in the operation was part of a coordinated effort involving commando, reconnaissance, infantry and armored forces.^[2][14]

Later in 2024, Shayetet 13 participated in an operation at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. The IDF’s 401st Brigade encircled the hospital before naval commandos conducted precise activities inside it. Shayetet 13 personnel located and confiscated grenades, guns, ammunition and other military equipment. The sequence shows how the unit worked within a larger operation: conventional troops controlled the surrounding area while commandos searched a specific site. The weapons found there were part of the evidence of Hamas’s military use of the area. The Kamal Adwan operation, like the fighting near Shifa Hospital, placed naval commandos in a land operation where the principal tasks were locating armed personnel, weapons and infrastructure.^[8][15]

Current status

Shayetet 13 remains an active Israeli Navy unit based at Atlit. Its public mission continues to encompass operations at sea, on land and in the air, supported by training in infantry combat, diving and naval assault. The operations documented from October 7 through 2024 show its continuing role in maritime defense and in the Gaza war. It has intercepted a member of Hamas’s naval command, fought attackers inside Israel, rescued hostages, found tunnel shafts and arms caches, and joined targeted operations against Hamas commanders and weapons. These assignments reflect the range for which the unit was formed: reaching a target through specialized means and conducting combat once there.^{[11][12][14][15]}

Its place within the IDF is also defined by cooperation with other forces. Shayetet 13 has assisted Sayeret Matkal, served as a boarding force for the navy and fought alongside infantry, reconnaissance and armored units. Its history runs from the Palyam’s maritime skills and its 1949–1950 formation through amphibious raids, vessel interdiction and contemporary operations in Gaza. Atlit remains the institutional base connecting those periods. As a state military unit, Shayetet 13 operates under the Israeli Navy rather than as an independent armed movement; its personnel and commanders are part of the IDF’s wider command structure.^{[12][13][16][17]}