The Sunday Times - Embedded with Israel’s 401st Armoured Brigade, Anshel Pfeffer sees troops cope with the constant threat of ambush as they attempt to seek and destroy an elusive enemy.
As the sun was setting over the Mediterranean last night, the mortar rounds fired from a concealed Hamas stronghold were getting closer.
When one struck about 200 yards from the command post of an Israeli brigade combat group in a northern neighbourhood of Gaza City, the soldiers took up defensive positions.
“One mortar landed just by here last night,” an officer said. “Most of the Hamas terrorists in this sector have either been killed or have fled, but there are still enough of them around that we have to be constantly on guard.”
Gunners in the turrets of the Merkava 4 tanks, parked around the command post, scoured the remaining taller buildings nearby as he spoke. They used heat-sensing cameras to search for any sign of movement and fired at suspicious areas with .50 calibre machineguns.
Israel’s military advances into Gaza City
“Hamas is all underground now,” said one of the brigade’s commanders, a lieutenant colonel. “They won’t fight us out in the open. And it’s hard for them to get a clear location from us when they pop out for a few moments from one of the tunnel entrances and try to ambush us.”
The command post was on the veranda of a small destroyed villa overlooking the sea. On a table the soldiers had spread out their combat rations. It is unclear how many floors the villa originally had, as only the ground floor was largely intact, a tall, elaborate water pipe standing in one corner near the entrance. On what remained of the second floor a few red sofas stood in a room that now had no walls; just some ceiling beams.
“We’ve seen very few civilians in the eight days we’ve been here,” said the lieutenant colonel. They hadn’t seen much of Hamas either. Overlooking the command post was a school building, its western wing destroyed. “We had no intention of firing at the school,” the officer said. “But Hamas fired at us from the school, and when we get fired upon, we respond. They fired at us also from the mosque.”
The mosque’s narrow minaret now leans to one side, the result of a direct hit. But despite constant surveillance by Israeli drones buzzing above, Hamas is still finding ways to launch rounds at the Israeli troops.
The opportunity to witness the devastation was provided by an embed yesterday with Israel’s 401st Armoured Brigade as it advanced into the city. In a war where facts and context are being contested as hotly as inches of territory, access was tightly controlled, and this report was subject to approval by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Evidence of recent fighting was all around. On the way in, it was evident that much of the small towns at the northernmost edge of Gaza had been flattened. In Gaza City itself, there was widespread damage, although many buildings were still standing after a four-week bombardment of the territory that the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas, says has killed more than 9,000 people.
One hundred miles to the east, Arab diplomats gathering in the Jordanian capital, Amman, called for an immediate ceasefire to prevent further loss of life. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, disagreed, telling them that a ceasefire would leave Hamas “in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7”, when it was responsible for killing more than 1,400 people in the raid on Israel that ignited the war.
Blinken again proposed humanitarian pauses to protect civilians and get aid in and foreign nationals out, “while still enabling Israel to achieve its objective, the defeat of Hamas”.
Earlier, when our armoured convoy crossed what was once the border fence, now mostly dismantled, two quick series of orange-red streaks flashed overhead from the south. Seconds later rocket-attack sirens sounded in the Israeli coastal city of Ashdod. The rockets were destroyed in mid-flight by the Iron Dome missile-defence system.
As the convoy of tanks and heavy armoured infantry-carriers made its way south down a sandy track ploughed up by the tank-tracks near the coast, an improvised explosive device blew up just behind the tank in the lead, barely scratching it. Further down the road, another mortar round damaged the lead vehicle in a logistics column.
For long minutes, the two convoys were stuck, with gunners anxiously scouring the surrounding ruins. The convoy reached the command-post villa with no further incident. Not all of the convoys are as fortunate. Earlier in the week, a Namer armoured infantry carrier was hit by two anti-tank missiles and all ten soldiers inside were killed.
A month ago more than a million Palestinians lived in and around Gaza City, in the area now encircled by Israeli troops. Most have fled south, but the IDF assess that about a quarter remain, mainly in the city’s centre. ‘I had to carry a decapitated body,’ says Gazan child after blast at Jabalia camp
On the ground in Gaza City today the main focus of the Israeli offensive is downwards.
“We’ve already found dozens of tunnel entrances,” said Yiftach, a major in the tank brigade, who was recalled from his law studies. “We never go down a tunnel. Whenever we find an exit, we call in the sappers who blow it up.”
One of the armoured vehicles in the convoy carried instead of an infantry squad a medical evacuation team. Its interior was set up as a mobile intensive-care unit, with refrigerated blood transfusions, a doctor and a paramedic, 32 year-old Yonat, a mother of two small children who was called up to reserve duty from her civilian job as an operations officer in Israel’s national ambulance service.
“This is my second war in Gaza,” she said. “I was a combat-paramedic in the 2014 operation as well, but that time I went in on foot. Now we’re all in armoured vehicles and it gives us a better opportunity to stabilise the situation of wounded soldiers and get them out sooner so they can be helicoptered to hospital.”
Before being called up, she was among the first-responders sent to the Israeli communities attacked on October 7. She did not want to talk about what she saw that day. “This war is different than 2014. It’s much more personal for me this time. It’s about protecting our civilians from such a thing happening again.”
“I can’t forget seeing in one of the cars on the way to Kibbutz Kfar Aza a mother holding a baby, both of them shot,” said the lieutenant colonel, who arrived there with a squad of tanks on October 7, after dozens had been murdered on the kibbutz. “Everyone here in the brigade knows someone who was killed on October 7 and it’s clear to us what our mission here is.”
Senior Israeli officers are aware that international pressure may force Israel to scale back its forces soon. “We know we have precious time right now to go in with all this force, before we have to change tactics. So we’re not pausing and going in with all the force we have,” said the lieutenant colonel. This is his third war in Gaza — he was on the ground in 2009 and 2014 and his father is a reservist serving on the northern border.
“We have to finish off Hamas this time,” he said. “I don’t want my four-year-old son to have to come to Gaza as well in the future.”
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Troops of the 460th Brigade in northern Gaza, in a photograph released by the Israel Defence Forces, which said they had killed Hamas fighters and found tunnels and weapons.
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