The first visit to Gaza after October 7 showed a relatively intact city, amidst plumes of smoke and sounds of battle. A year later, in November 2024, Jabalia was a massive pile of rubble, stretching from horizon to horizon, with packs of dogs roaming among the ruins and garbage. On the thousandth day of the war, nothing remained in the area. The densely populated camp looked desolate and quiet like the surface of the moon. Engineering drills searched for tunnels below ground, with D9 bulldozers operating above. In the vast majority of Gaza, nothing remained, neither above ground nor below it.
This is the situation in all the territory controlled by Israel, which makes up about two-thirds of the Strip's territory. Rafah was wiped off the face of the earth, as were most of Khan Yunis and huge swaths of Gaza. Ninety-two percent of the tunnels have been completely destroyed; the rest will be destroyed soon.
Inside Hamas-controlled Gaza, there have been increasing reports recently of a resurgence, tunnel rehabilitation, training exercises, and an inevitable IDF operation. These reports should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Hamas is failing to genuinely rearm, after its smuggling routes in the air, on land, at sea, and underground were choked off.
Three hundred sixty-two smuggling tunnels from Egypt were destroyed in Rafah. Training is conducted in hiding, reconstruction materials aren't arriving, and the newly dug tunnels in the sand are barely shored up with whatever is available: sheet metal, wood scraps. Iran bends over backward to protect Hezbollah; for Hamas, it doesn't even pick up the phone. That's what happens to someone who starts a war without permission and is considered a lost cause.
Perhaps this is why Hamas recently agreed to terms that include handing over all heavy weaponry, tunnel maps, production sites, and weapons caches. Its leaders agreed that the weapons would be surrendered to a committee, not to Israel. The multinational force that will subsequently deploy will serve as a buffer between Hamas and Israel, and will be responsible for the collection. Israel will withdraw only after Hamas is disarmed, the militias' weapons are also collected, all government positions are handed over to a technocratic committee, and police officers who fail a security clearance are forced to retire.
The agreements make no mention of small arms, which flood Gaza by the tens of thousands. How flooded? The divisions maneuvering in Gaza used to transport rifles to the Israeli border, where bulldozers would run them over and crush them. At a certain point, they asked to stop collecting weapons because it had become their primary activity.
"Make no mistake," says a very senior army officer, "of all the enemies we have faced, they are the most cruel, the most hateful toward us, and the most uninhibited." And this is exactly the reason why it was forbidden to stop and "fight another day," as Nitzan Alon and others suggested. From the perimeter, without this level of destruction and without isolating them from their patrons, Gaza would have recovered rapidly. By day one thousand, it would have already become a monstrous threat again, rather than a wave of rubble and despair.
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