The armed convoy of jeeps packed with reporters thundered into dusty Rafah, past destroyed houses and battered apartment buildings.
As we dismounted from our Humvees, a silence enveloped this area of southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border. Slabs of concrete and twisted rebar littered the battered landscape. Kittens darted through the wreckage.
Streets that once bustled with life were now a maze of rubble. Everyone was gone.
More than a million people have fled an Israeli onslaught that began two months ago. Many have been repeatedly displaced and now live in tent camps that stretch for miles, facing uncertain futures as they mourn the loss of loved ones.
As Israel says it is winding down its operation against Hamas in Rafah, the Israeli military has invited foreign journalists to visit the city under surveillance. The military says it has fought with precision and restraint against Hamas fighters in civilian areas.
But the death, destruction and mass displacement of civilians have increasingly isolated Israel diplomatically.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict. While that figure makes no distinction between civilians and Hamas fighters, it does include dozens of deaths in May when Israel dropped two 250-pound bombs on a tent camp in Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimates the number of Palestinian deaths at around 30,000 and said that about half were civilians.
The Israeli invasion was intended to destroy Hamas and free its hostages. So far, it has accomplished neither.
According to the military count, at least 900 members of the Hamas brigade and a total of 15,000 Hamas fighters were killed in Rafah.
But three months after Mr. Netanyahu declared that “total victory is within reach,” the military acknowledges that the siege of Rafah has eliminated only a third of Hamas’s brigade. Hamas’s leadership remains intact. And about 120 hostages are believed to be still somewhere in Gaza, though about a third are said to be dead.
Palestinians who fled the city have no idea when they will return or what they will find when they do. Marwan Shaath, 57, said he and his family left their three-story home behind. “It was meant to be the family home for generations to come,” he said in an interview. His friends have sent him photos of what’s left. “It’s been hit hard. Half of it has collapsed already. No walls, no windows, and large parts of it are burned.”
Fighting in Rafah has been intense, Israeli officials said, with Hamas setting hundreds of booby traps. Officials showed us a video they said showed a house rigged with 50-gallon drinking water tanks filled with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday, the Israeli military reported killing dozens of Hamas fighters in Rafah, and Colonel Yair Zuckerman, the commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade fighting in Rafah, mocked his Hamas colleague when he informed us.
“Where is the commander of the Rafah Brigade?” he asked.
The army monitored our visit to Rafah. We had to stay with the convoy, although Israeli officials did not monitor or censor our work. A Hamas representative did not respond to text messages seeking comment.
We saw the periphery of a neighborhood torn apart by fighting. It was clear where Israeli forces had entered Rafah from the south and destroyed corridors for their tanks and troops. The air was thick with sand and fine debris.
Artillery, jets and bulldozers had leveled buildings or reduced them to shells. From where we were, the extent was incalculable, although it was measured by satellite. We saw dozens of relief trucks, but it was impossible to judge the relief efforts, which the United Nations has criticized as hopelessly inadequate.
Israel accuses Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, placing rocket launchers near schools and building tunnels under crowded neighborhoods, including Rafah.
The military showed us photos of cameras placed in a neighborhood that officials said Hamas used to monitor Israeli forces and plan attacks against them. Israeli soldiers said they found Hamas combat kits scattered in many homes, along with advanced weapons such as Russian surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli officials argue that such tactics justify fighting in sometimes crowded neighborhoods, where Hamas fighters hide and store weapons.
But Hamas’s guerrilla tactics also reflect the power imbalance between a sophisticated army and a militia reliant on smuggled weapons.
Much of that smuggling, Israeli officials say, takes place not far from where we stood, at the Rafah crossing and in tunnels into Egypt. Stopping the flow of weapons was a major reason for Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israeli officials have described these smuggling routes as Hamas’s “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 declined to say how many — along the border. It was unclear how many of those tunnels were active before the war began.
“There is a lot of terrorist infrastructure built along the border,” said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the military’s top spokesman.
Just over a football field from the border, the army took us to a manhole-like entrance to a tunnel between two damaged houses. Destroying these tunnels can be devastating to the buildings above.
“We are ordinary people living above ground,” Mr. Shaath said. “I don’t know what happens below ground, and whatever happens, it’s not my fault as a citizen.”
More than two dozen Israeli soldiers have been killed in fighting in southern Gaza, including eight in an explosion in Rafah last month, one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli soldiers since the ground invasion war in Gaza began. Israeli sniper fire crackled at times when we were there.
Israeli officials have identified Nearly 800 soldiers have been killed since the October 7 terrorist attacks, when Hamas-led gunmen 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, the previous commander of Nahal. A few hours after his death, Colonel Zuckerman replaced him. He told us that he and his troops intended to finish the job in Rafah.
We climbed into the jeeps and drove to another spot nearby, with a view of the rest of Rafah stretching out to the sea. Admiral Hagari climbed a small sand hill.
He pointed to Tal al-Sultan, another Rafah neighborhood. Outside, he said, hostages were being held. A small group of Americans could be among them.
To free them, he said, rescue operations or military pressure were needed.
“We will bring the hostages back,” he told us. “Any of your countries would do the same after October 7.”
