The armed convoy of jeeps full of reporters rumbled right into a dusty Rafah, passing flattened homes and battered house buildings.
As we dismounted our Humvees, a stillness gripped this swath of southern Gaza, close to the border with Egypt. Slabs of concrete and twisted rebar dotted the scarred panorama. Kittens darted by means of the wreckage.
Streets as soon as bustling with life had been now a maze of rubble. Everybody was gone.
Greater than 1,000,000 folks have fled to keep away from an Israeli onslaught that started two months in the past. Many have been displaced repeatedly and now stay in tent cities that stretch for miles, the place they face an unsure future as they mourn the lack of family members.
As Israel says it’s winding down its operation in opposition to Hamas in Rafah, the Israeli navy invited overseas journalists into the town on a supervised go to. The navy says that it has fought with precision and restraint in opposition to Hamas fighters embedded in civilian areas.
However the demise, destruction and mass displacement of civilians have left Israel more and more remoted diplomatically.
Greater than 37,000 Palestinians have died within the battle, in keeping with the Gazan well being ministry. Though that determine doesn’t distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters, it consists of the handfuls killed in Might when Israel dropped a pair of 250-pound bombs on a tent camp in Rafah.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has positioned the variety of Palestinian useless at about 30,000 and said that about half had been civilians.
The Israeli invasion was meant to destroy Hamas and free its hostages. To date, it has achieved neither.
By the navy’s depend, it has killed at the very least 900 members of the Hamas brigade in Rafah and 15,000 Hamas fighters total.
However three months after Mr. Netanyahu declared that “total victory is within reach,” the navy acknowledges that the Rafah siege has eradicated solely one-third of Hamas’s brigade. Hamas’s management stays intact. And roughly 120 hostages are believed to stay someplace in Gaza, though a couple of third are considered useless.
Palestinians who fled the town do not know when they may return and what they may discover once they do. Marwan Shaath, 57, mentioned he and his household had left behind their three-story house. “It was meant to be the household house for generations to return,” he mentioned in an interview. His associates have despatched him photos of what’s left. “It’s badly hit. Half of it’s down already. No partitions, no home windows and massive components of it had been burned.”
The preventing in Rafah has been intense, Israeli officers mentioned, with Hamas laying tons of of booby traps. Officers confirmed us a video that they mentioned confirmed a house outfitted with 50-gallon drinking-water tanks filled with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday, the Israeli navy mentioned it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in Rafah, and Col. Yair Zuckerman, the commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade preventing in Rafah, taunted his Hamas counterpart as he briefed us.
“The place is the Rafah Brigade commander?” he requested.
The navy supervised our go to to Rafah. We had to stick with the convoy, though Israeli officers didn’t overview or censor our work. A consultant of Hamas didn’t reply to textual content messages in search of remark.
We noticed the periphery of a neighborhood that had been shredded by preventing. It was clear the place Israeli forces had punched into Rafah from the south, smashing corridors for his or her tanks and troops. The air was thick with sand and advantageous particles.
Artillery, fighter jets and bulldozers had leveled buildings or diminished them to shells. From the place we stood, the dimensions was incalculable, though it has been measured by satellites. We noticed dozens of help vehicles, however it was not possible to evaluate aid efforts, which the United Nations has criticized as woefully insufficient.
Israel has accused Hamas of utilizing Palestinians as human shields, positioning rocket launchers close to colleges and constructing tunnels beneath crowded neighborhoods, together with in Rafah.
The navy confirmed us pictures of cameras positioned round a neighborhood, which officers mentioned allowed Hamas to observe Israeli forces and plan assaults in opposition to them. Israeli troopers say they discovered Hamas preventing kits scattered in lots of properties, together with superior weapons like Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli officers argue that such ways justify preventing in generally crowded neighborhoods, the place Hamas fighters conceal and stash weapons.
However Hamas’s guerrilla ways additionally replicate an influence imbalance between a classy navy and a militia that depends on smuggled weapons.
A lot of that smuggling, Israeli officers say, happens not removed from the place we stood, on the Rafah border crossing and in tunnels to Egypt. Stopping the movement of weapons was a key cause for Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israeli officers have described these smuggling routes as Hamas’s “oxygen.”
Regardless of a longstanding Israeli blockade and an Egyptian campaign to cease underground smuggling, Israel’s navy spokesman instructed us that troopers had discovered tunnels — he wouldn’t say what number of — alongside the border. It was not clear what number of of these tunnels had been energetic earlier than the struggle began.
“Quite a lot of terror infrastructure was constructed subsequent to the border,” mentioned, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the navy’s chief spokesman.
A little bit over a soccer area’s size away from the border, the navy took us to a manhole-like entrance to a tunnel between a pair of broken properties. Destroying these tunnels might be devastating to the buildings above them.
“We’re unusual folks dwelling over the bottom,” Mr. Shaath mentioned. “I don’t know what occurs beneath the bottom, and no matter is occurring shouldn’t be my fault as a civilian.”
Greater than two dozen Israeli troopers have been killed preventing in southern Gaza, together with eight final month in an explosion in Rafah that was one of many deadliest assaults on Israeli troopers because the floor invasion struggle began in Gaza. Whereas we had been there, Israeli sniper fireplace often crackled.
Israeli officials have identified practically 700 troopers who’ve been killed because the terrorist assaults of Oct. 7, when Hamas-led gunmen stormed into Israel, taking hostages and killing civilians, together with girls and kids. Officers say about 1,200 folks died that day.
One in every of them was Col. Jonathan Steinberg, the earlier commander of Nahal. Hours after his demise, Colonel Zuckerman changed him. He instructed us that he and his troops deliberate to complete the job in Rafah.
We climbed into the jeeps and drove to a different close by spot, with a vista of the remainder of Rafah extending to the ocean. Admiral Hagari climbed atop a small sandy hill.
He pointed towards Tal al-Sultan, one other Rafah neighborhood. On the market, he mentioned, hostages had been being held. A small group of Individuals might be amongst them.
Releasing them, he mentioned, required rescue operations or navy strain.
“We’ll carry again the hostages,” he instructed us. “Any one among your nations would do the identical after Oct. 7.”