A convoy of armed jeeps filled with journalists rumbled into dusty Rafah, passing flattened houses and dilapidated apartment buildings.
When we got off the Humvees, it was quiet in the southern Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt. Slabs of concrete and twisted rebar dot the scarred landscape. The kitten ran through the rubble.
The streets that were once bustling with life are now in ruins. They all left.
More than a million people have fled to escape the Israeli offensive that began two months ago. Many have been repeatedly displaced and now live in mile-long tent cities, where they face an uncertain future while mourning their loved ones.
As Israel said it was winding down operations against Hamas in Rafah, the Israeli military invited foreign journalists to the city in a supervised visit. The military said it had fought with precision and controlled Hamas fighters who were in civilian areas.
But the death, destruction and mass displacement of civilians has left Israel increasingly isolated diplomatically.
More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Although the figures do not distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters, they include dozens killed in May when Israel dropped a pair of 250-kilogram bombs on a camp in Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put the Palestinian death toll at around 30,000 and said that about half were civilians.
The Israeli invasion was intended to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. So far, it’s not over.
According to the military count, it has killed at least 900 members of the Hamas brigade in Rafah and 15,000 Hamas fighters overall.
But three months after Mr. Netanyahu announced that “total victory is achievable,” the military admitted that the Rafah siege had eliminated only one-third of the Hamas brigade. The leadership of Hamas remains intact. And about 120 hostages are believed to remain somewhere in Gaza, although about a third are dead.
Palestinians fleeing the city do not know when they will return and what they will find when they do. Marwan Shaath, 57, said he and his family had left their three-storey house. “It’s meant to be a family home for generations to come,” he said in an interview. His friends have sent him pictures of what’s left. “It was hit hard. Half of it was down. There were no walls, no windows and a large part was burnt.
Fighting in Rafah has intensified, Israeli officials said, with Hamas laying hundreds of booby traps. Officials shared a video they said showed a home equipped with a 50-gallon drinking water tank filled with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in Rafah, and Colonel Yair Zuckerman, the commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade fighting in Rafah, mocked his Hamas counterpart as he told us.
“Where is the Rafah Brigade commander?” he asked.
The military monitored our visit to Rafah. We have to stay with the convoy, even if the Israeli officials do not check or censor our work. Hamas representatives did not respond to text messages seeking comment.
We saw the outskirts of the neighborhood that had been destroyed by fighting. It is clear where the Israeli forces attacked Rafah from the south, destroying the corridor for their tanks and troops. The air was thick with fine sand and dust.
Artillery, fighter jets and bulldozers have leveled buildings or reduced them to shells. From where we stand, its size is incalculable, even if it has been measured by satellite. We saw dozens of aid trucks, but it was impossible to evaluate the relief effort, which the United Nations criticized as insufficient.
Israel has accused Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, positioning rocket launchers near schools and building tunnels under crowded neighborhoods, including in Rafah.
The military shared photos of cameras installed around the neighborhood, which officials say allow Hamas to monitor Israeli forces and plan attacks against them. Israeli soldiers said they found Hamas war equipment scattered in several homes, along with advanced weapons like Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli officials argue that the tactic justifies fighting in the sometimes crowded environment, where Hamas fighters hide and stockpile weapons.
But Hamas’ guerrilla tactics also reflect the power imbalance between a sophisticated military and militias that rely on smuggled weapons.
Most of the smuggling, Israeli officials say, is not far from where we stand, at the Rafah border crossing and in the tunnel to Egypt. Stopping the flow of weapons is the main reason for Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israeli officials described the smuggling route as Hamas’ “oxygen.”
Despite Israel’s long-standing blockade and Egypt’s campaign to stop underground smuggling, an Israeli military spokesman said soldiers had discovered tunnels — he would not say how many — along the border. It is unclear how many tunnels were active before the war began.
“A lot of terror infrastructure is built next to the border,” said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman.
A little over the length of the football field away from the border, the military took us to the manhole-like entrance to the tunnel between the pair of destroyed houses. Destroying the tunnel can destroy the building above.
“We are ordinary people who live on the ground,” Mr. Shaath said. “I don’t know what is happening on the ground, and whatever is happening is not my fault as a civilian.”
More than two dozen Israeli soldiers have been killed in southern Gaza, including eight months ago in an explosion in Rafah that was one of the deadliest attacks on the Israeli army since the ground invasion war began in Gaza. While there, Israeli sniper fire occasionally screamed.
Israeli officials have identified nearly 700 soldiers who have been killed since the October 7 terrorist attack, when gunmen led by Hamas invaded Israel, taking hostages and killing civilians, including women and children. Officials say about 1,200 people died that day.
One of them was Colonel Jonathan Steinberg, Nahal’s previous commander. Hours after his death, Colonel Zuckerman succeeded him. He told me that he and his troops were planning to complete their mission in Rafah.
We climbed into the jeeps and drove to another nearby place, with a vista from the rest of Rafah extending to the sea. Admiral Hagari climbed atop a small sand dune.
He pointed to Tal al-Sultan, another Rafah neighborhood. Outside, he said, the hostages were being held. A small group of Americans may be among them.
Freeing them, he said, would require a rescue operation or military pressure.
“We will bring back the hostages,” he said. “Each of your countries will do the same thing after October 7.”
