Although the IDF is making consistent progress against Hamas on many fronts, the army sources acknowledged to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that it could easily take a full year or even years to fully root out the terror group.
The starting point of the conversation was the recent success of the IDF killing 300 Hamas terrorists and the success prior to the January 19 ceasefire of having killed 18,000-20,000, but then combining that picture with the fact that Hamas may have another 25,000 or more fighters and that currently, the IDF is focusing lots of energy on eliminating the terror group’s remaining fighters in Rafah.
In other words, the IDF has killed many Hamas fighters, and few are left to resist it in Rafah from the original 4,000-8,000 terrorists, but if the largest group of known and consolidated fighters the military is going after is a few hundred, and it is up against an enemy that has 25,000, then finding and rooting out that enemy could be a long process.
While some Israeli officials hope that Hamas will soon disband and its top leaders will accept expulsion, if that does not happen and if Israel also does not reach a permanent ceasefire with Hamas, including with its moderate Sunni allies rebuilding Gaza, Jerusalem could be in for an extended and slow war of attrition in the Strip.
Some IDF officials recognize this scenario and believe it could take years, including gradually and painstakingly eliminating small numbers of terror cells at a time when their hiding places in schools and other civilian facilities are uncovered.
Other aspects of the IDF’s presentation of its latest accomplishments in Rafah also raised questions.
In June, August, and September 2024, during multiple visits by The Jerusalem Post to Rafah and multiple briefings from top defense officials, as well as public statements, it was declared that Hamas’s Rafah brigades had been completely defeated.
More specifically, it was declared that its forces in the Shaboura area of Rafah were completely defeated.
However, IDF sources now say that the remaining battalions were in Shaboura and that they had not been defeated because the IDF had never invaded that particular area.
Confronted over this apparent inconsistency, IDF officials implied that possibly previous statements had referred to the smaller Shaboura refugee camp, and that the Shaboura general area was larger and had not been fully invaded.
Previous IDF and other senior official statements on the issue had not been qualified in this way, but the latest statements may be a more nuanced and accurate depiction of the facts on the ground, with the earlier statements being exaggerated claims about the extent of the IDF’s victory.
In addition, there appears to have been a change in tone by IDF commanders.
If, under former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, there were IDF officials presenting narratives that sometimes were inconsistent with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s narratives, there now seems to be a trend in which IDF commanders toe the line with the political echelon.
For example, under Halevi and Gallant, many IDF officials voiced concern that military pressure would hopefully help coerce Hamas into releasing more hostages, but many recognized that such pressure could sometimes be a double-edged sword and unintentionally lead hostages to being harmed by Hamas or even by the IDF if they struck an area which they thought was “hostage-free.”
Now, there seems to be a trend where virtually all IDF officials are concurring that military pressure will only have the positive impact of potentially freeing hostages.
The importance of the Philadelphi Corridor
In addition, Defense Minister Israel Katz responded to a question by the Post on Wednesday with a powerful affirmation of the importance of holding on to the Philadelphi Corridor.
Katz even said that new cross-border smuggling tunnels into Egypt have been recently found and that if the IDF is not present at the Corridor, Hamas could reignite a major rearmament campaign.
In contrast, during a visit to the corridor in September 2024, multiple top IDF officials said that there had been at most 10 cross-border tunnels, that all of them had been blocked off, and that prior to and during the war, Hamas was only using the tunnels for maneuvering its existing rocket arsenal, but not to smuggle in new weapons from Egypt.
Instead, the senior IDF officials said that essentially all of Hamas’s vast weapons had been smuggled into Gaza years before through the above-ground Rafah crossing during periods when Egypt did not carefully inspect for smuggling.