The armed convoy of jeeps filled with reporters rumbled into a dusty Rafah, passing flattened houses and battered apartment buildings.
As we dismounted our Humvees, a stillness gripped this swath of the southern Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt. Slabs of concrete and twisted rebar dotted the scarred landscape. Kittens darted through the wreckage.
Streets once bustling with life were now a maze of rubble. Everyone was gone.
More than one million people have fled to avoid an Israeli onslaught that began two months ago. Many have been displaced repeatedly and now live in tent cities that stretch for miles, where they face an uncertain future as they mourn the loss of loved ones.
As Israel says it is winding down its operation against Hamas in Rafah, the Israeli military invited foreign journalists into the city on a supervised visit. The military says it has fought with precision and restraint against Hamas fighters embedded in civilian areas. But the death, destruction and mass displacement of civilians have left Israel increasingly isolated diplomatically.
More than 38,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. Although that figure does not distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters, it includes the dozens killed in May when Israel dropped a pair of 250-pound (113kg) bombs on a tent camp in Rafah.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has placed the number of Palestinians dead at about 30,000 and said about half were civilians.
The Israeli invasion was intended to destroy Hamas and free its hostages. So far, it has accomplished neither.
By the military’s count, it has killed at least 900 members of the Hamas brigade in Rafah and 15,000 Hamas fighters overall.
But three months after Netanyahu declared that “total victory is within reach”, the military acknowledges that the Rafah siege has eliminated only one-third of Hamas’s brigade. Hamas’s leadership remains intact. And roughly 120 hostages are believed to remain somewhere in Gaza, although about one-third are thought to be dead.
Palestinians who fled the city have no idea when they will return and what they will find when they do. Marwan Shaath (57) said he and his family had left behind their three-storey home. “It was meant to be the family home for generations to come,” he said in an interview. His friends have sent him pictures of what is left. “It is badly hit. Half of it is down already. No walls, no windows and big parts of it were burned.”
The fighting in Rafah had been intense, Israeli officials said, with Hamas laying hundreds of booby traps. Officials showed us a video that they said showed a home outfitted with 50-gallon (190-litre) drinking-water tanks stuffed with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday the Israeli military said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in Rafah, and Col Yair Zuckerman, commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade fighting in Rafah, taunted his Hamas counterpart as he briefed us. “Where is the Rafah brigade commander?” he asked.
The military supervised our visit to Rafah. We had to stay with the convoy, although Israeli officials did not review or censor our work. A representative of Hamas did not respond to text messages seeking comment.
We saw the periphery of a neighbourhood that had been shredded by fighting. It was clear where Israeli forces had punched into Rafah from the south, smashing corridors for their tanks and troops. The air was thick with sand and fine debris.
The military showed us photographs of cameras positioned around a neighbourhood, which officials said allowed Hamas to monitor Israeli forces and plan attacks against them. Israeli soldiers say they found Hamas fighting kits scattered in many homes, along with advanced weapons like Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli officials argue that such tactics justify fighting in sometimes crowded neighbourhoods, where Hamas fighters hide and stash weapons. But Hamas’s guerrilla tactics also reflect a power imbalance between a sophisticated military and a militia that relies on smuggled weapons.
Much of that smuggling, Israeli officials say, occurs not far from where we stood, at the Rafah border crossing and in tunnels to Egypt. Stopping the flow of weapons was a key reason for Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israeli officials have described these smuggling routes as Hamas’ “oxygen”.
Despite a long-standing Israeli blockade and an Egyptian campaign to stop underground smuggling, Israel’s military spokesman told us that soldiers had found tunnels – he would not say how many – along the border. It was not clear how many of those tunnels were active before the war started. “A lot of terror infrastructure was built next to the border,” said Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman.
Israeli officials have identified nearly 700 soldiers who have been killed since the terrorist attacks of October 7th, when Hamas-led assailants stormed into Israel, taking hostages and killing civilians, including women and children. Israeli officials say about 1,200 people died that day.
One of them was Col Jonathan Steinberg, the previous commander of Nahal. Hours after his death, Zuckerman replaced him. He told us that he and his troops planned to finish the job in Rafah.
We climbed into the jeeps and drove to another nearby spot, with a vista of the rest of Rafah extending to the sea. Hagari climbed atop a small sandy hill.
He pointed toward Tal al-Sultan, another Rafah neighbourhood. Out there, he said, hostages were being held. Freeing them, he said, required rescue operations or military pressure.
“We will bring back the hostages,” he told us. “Any one of your countries would do the same after October 7th.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
