ADMIN
A white cat walking over a partially destroyed building in Rafah's Shabura refugee camp was the only civilian remnant of the Gaza neighborhood on the Egyptian border, which was overrun by Palestinians until early May.
A bullet-riddled Sonol sign still hangs over the rubble of what was once a gas station.
Half-destroyed concrete buildings stand, in some cases reduced to frame shells mixed with piles of rubble.
Big sand, which was once a paved road, makes Shabura look like dust.
The IDF brought a small group of reporters in a Humvee to this desert scene on Tuesday to talk with Nahal Brigade commander Col. Yar Zuckerman about the extent to which Hamas has integrated itself into civilian areas.
Just a week earlier, four IDF soldiers were killed when a building in which a bobby was trapped exploded. Now, however, an empty silence lay heavy under the bright afternoon sun, broken only by soldiers on the road and nearby tanks and tractors.
Zuckerman met with reporters on what he said was the 41st day of the battle for Rafah, in one of the more intact buildings in the neighborhood, whose occupants had fled.
Dressed in a khaki uniform and flak jacket, he sat with them in what was once a large second-floor apartment.
The windows were covered with blankets. The only civilian remnant of the room was a small sofa, with wooden trim and light brown fabric.
Soldiers wrote directional signs in Hebrew on the white walls: north, south, east and west.
The electricity was powered by a generator, which hummed throughout the conversation and broke a few times with the distant sound of explosions.
The table in front of Zuckerman was filled with computers. Using the wall as a screen, he mapped out how the troops were able to strategically enter Rafah, one step ahead of Hamas.
Endless tunnels in Rafah, challenge for the IDF
“The Rafah tunnels are chalk-filled,” he said, “in the last days alone, I found 17 tunnels.”
“There are almost no houses without tunnels,” he said, as he explained that the tunnels connected neighboring houses in a giant maze. Holes were also broken through the walls to connect them, he said.
To illustrate his point, he showed a picture with an open closet door and a hole in the concrete wall behind it.
Homes are rigged with wired explosives that can be detonated at a distance, Zuckerman said, citing last week's incident in which four soldiers were killed when a bomb exploded in a home believed to be free of such devices.
It's a different kind of battlefield, as he describes the methodical inch-by-inch fighting taking place in Rafah, with soldiers fighting above and below ground.
“It's slow and laborious,” he said, but the gains are “significant.”
Soldiers found caches of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and long-range rockets, Zuckerman explained, as he argued it was important to give the IDF time to complete its mission to demilitarize the area.
Soldiers here “understand that this existential problem rests on their soldiers,” Zuckerman said, describing a situation in which countless small, almost imperceptible successes would eventually lead to total victory.
He didn't want to measure how long it would take to complete the mission, just getting the job done was important.
“We don't want to leave until we solve the problem,” he said.
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