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The armed convoy of jeeps crammed with reporters rumbled right into a dusty Rafah, passing flattened homes and battered condominium 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 way of the wreckage.
Streets as soon as bustling with life have been now a maze of rubble. Everybody was gone.
Greater than one million individuals have fled to keep away from an Israeli onslaught that started two months in the past. Many have been displaced repeatedly and now reside 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 towards 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 towards 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 38,000 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 contains the handfuls killed in Could 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 lifeless at about 30,000 and stated that about half have been civilians.
The Israeli invasion was meant to destroy Hamas and free its hostages. To date, it has completed neither.
By the navy’s depend, it has killed a minimum of 900 members of the Hamas brigade in Rafah and 15,000 Hamas fighters total.
However three months after Mr. Netanyahu declared that “whole victory is inside attain,” 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 few third are considered lifeless.
Palestinians who fled the town don’t know when they’ll return and what they’ll discover after they do. Marwan Shaath, 57, stated he and his household had left behind their three-story dwelling. “It was meant to be the household dwelling for generations to return,” he stated in an interview. His associates have despatched him footage of what’s left. “It’s badly hit. Half of it’s down already. No partitions, no home windows and massive components of it have been burned.”
The preventing in Rafah has been intense, Israeli officers stated, with Hamas laying a whole bunch of booby traps. Officers confirmed us a video that they stated confirmed a house outfitted with 50-gallon drinking-water tanks filled with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday, the Israeli navy stated 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 assessment or censor our work. A consultant of Hamas didn’t reply to textual content messages looking for 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 superb particles.
Artillery, fighter jets and bulldozers had leveled buildings or lowered 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, but it surely 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 faculties and constructing tunnels beneath crowded neighborhoods, together with in Rafah.
The navy confirmed us photographs of cameras positioned round a neighborhood, which officers stated allowed Hamas to watch Israeli forces and plan assaults towards 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 techniques justify preventing in typically crowded neighborhoods, the place Hamas fighters cover and stash weapons.
However Hamas’s guerrilla techniques additionally mirror an influence imbalance between a complicated 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 stream of weapons was a key motive 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 marketing campaign to cease underground smuggling, Israel’s navy spokesman advised 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 have been lively earlier than the struggle began.
“Quite a lot of terror infrastructure was constructed subsequent to the border,” stated, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the navy’s chief spokesman.
A little bit over a soccer discipline’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 could be devastating to the buildings above them.
“We’re extraordinary individuals residing over the bottom,” Mr. Shaath stated. “I don’t know what occurs below 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 have been there, Israeli sniper hearth sometimes crackled.
Israeli officers have recognized 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 ladies and youngsters. Officers say about 1,200 individuals died that day.
Considered one of them was Col. Jonathan Steinberg, the earlier commander of Nahal. Hours after his demise, Colonel Zuckerman changed him. He advised 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 stated, hostages have been being held. A small group of People could possibly be amongst them.
Releasing them, he stated, required rescue operations or navy strain.
“We’ll carry again the hostages,” he advised us. “Any one in all your international locations would do the identical after Oct. 7.”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London.
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