IDF declares Hamas’s Rafah Brigade defeated; no active cross-border tunnels found
Military discloses just 9 tunnels crossed from Gaza to Egypt, all had been blocked up before IDF arrived; over 2,000 terror operatives killed, 13 km of underground passages destroyed
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The Hamas terror group’s Rafah Brigade has been decimated, at least 2,308 of its operatives have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, and over 13 kilometers (8 miles) worth of tunnels have been destroyed, military officials told reporters in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city on Thursday.
Now, as the IDF maintains control of the entire city and the border area with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, combat engineers are completing their investigations of a few dozen Hamas tunnels that have not yet been demolished, an operation that will not take longer than a few weeks.
With seemingly no hostage deal with the terror group on the horizon — under which the IDF would likely have to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, including the Philadelphi Corridor — it currently remains unclear what the IDF will do in Rafah once the last tunnel is destroyed.
Senior military officials said they would carry out whatever missions the political echelon eventually orders them to complete.
“The Rafah Brigade has been defeated,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, the general in charge of the offensive in the city, told reporters at the Philadelphi Corridor. “Their four battalions have been destroyed, and we have completed operational control over the entire urban area.”
Cohen, who commands the IDF’s 162nd Division, said that his combat engineering forces located 203 separate, but interconnected, tunnels in the Philadelphi Corridor, stretching from the Egypt border to about 300 meters away on the outskirts of the city of Rafah.
“Most of them we have destroyed,” the general said. “We are operating at the other sites to investigate them, and when we will finish investigating, they will be destroyed.”
Out of the 203 tunnels, Cohen confirmed that the IDF had so far located a total of nine that had crossed into Egypt, but every single one had been blocked up before the IDF arrived, either by Egyptian authorities or Hamas themselves.
“There are a total of nine underground sites [tunnels] that cross into Egyptian territory, but they have collapsed, they are not usable, they are not active,” he said.
The existence of cross-border tunnels between Egypt and the Strip has long been a matter of public record. Egypt itself has worked for years to thwart the cross-border network, blowing tunnels up, flooding them with water, pumping toxic gas into them, and even razing homes along the border to establish a buffer zone.
As Egypt demolished the tunnels on its side of the border, and as Hamas grew in power, it relied less and less on the cross-border passages for weapon smuggling, according to Israeli assessments. Instead, Hamas would smuggle in weaponry overground via the Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt. Additionally, a significant portion of Hamas’s weaponry has been locally made, mostly its rockets, RPGs and explosive devices, according to IDF assessments.
Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on the IDF remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor to ostensibly prevent Hamas from rearming, the military appeared to have been in no rush to search for the few inactive cross-border tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, launching its offensive there only in May, seven months into the war.
Still, the IDF had considered it necessary to take control of the Rafah crossing, which Hamas was indeed using to smuggle in some arms, although possibly at a lower volume in recent years due to its increased local production.
Reporters were given a tour of one of the former cross-border tunnels on Thursday, previously shown off by the IDF in a press release. The tunnel, which did not run particularly deep underground, was one of the widest and tallest found in Gaza, big enough for vehicles to pass through.
Like the other eight tunnels that crossed into Egypt, this one too was blocked up — once on the Egyptian side, and a second time by Hamas inside Gaza. It is unclear why the terror group collapsed part of its own tunnel in this case, but some military officials speculated that it was an attempt by Hamas to hide the fact that it did previously have cross-border tunnels.
‘Mother of tunnels’
Hamas’s tunnel network in Rafah has been seen as unique, and large, in comparison to other areas of Gaza, with IDF officials describing it as “umm al-anfaq,” the mother of tunnels in Arabic, due to the underground passages, on three levels, being all interconnected.
In northern Gaza, the IDF located separate tunnels used by senior Hamas commanders, which were not connected to the passages used by low-ranking operatives.
In Rafah, every single tunnel was connected to the others, according to the IDF, with some military officials describing it as an underground city larger than the one above it.
One major tunnel complex in the Yabna area, located some 40 meters deep, was used by the commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, Muhammad Shabana, and possibly other top members of the terror group during the war.
The 162nd Division also saw during its offensive in Rafah Hamas operatives repeatedly collapsing parts of tunnels as they attempted to withdraw from areas where the IDF was approaching.
One tunnel in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, where Hamas operatives had blocked off one of the main entrances and collapsed another part, was where six Israeli hostages were recently murdered.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi were killed by their captors in the tunnel on August 29, before being discovered by IDF troops less than two days later.
Reporters were taken to the now-uncovered entrance to the tunnel, located in a children’s playroom in a home in Tel Sultan.
The 162nd Division had almost completed its operations in Tel Sultan before the bodies were found, but commanders had decided to check out one last site where they had intelligence of a tunnel that was not yet uncovered.
Initially, troops were unable to find the tunnel. They then circled back with an excavator to dig up the ground in hopes of finding an entrance. Unconventionally, the excavator did not dig to find the tunnel entrance, but rather fell slightly into the shaft.
Inside the 20-meter-deep tunnel, a blast door had blocked the way forward. So combat engineers dug down a few meters after it, now that they knew where the route was. A drone was then sent down into the tunnel, and the bodies of the six murdered hostages were found.
The 162nd Division operated in Tel Sultan with the assumption that hostages could be held in the area, but the possibility was seen as low-to-moderate, as before the Rafah offensive, some 1.4 million Palestinians — among them many Hamas terrorists — fled to the Israeli designated humanitarian zone. The assumption was that, like in other areas of Gaza, Hamas operatives would move the hostages with them as they fled.
As the operation continued in Tel Sultan, the IDF identified and killed the entire leadership of the Hamas battalion there, who were all fleeing. This again led commanders to assume that the chances of hostages being in the area were low, since the Tel Sultan Battalion commanders and operatives were fleeing without any hostages with them.
But days later, on August 27, the IDF rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi from a tunnel in Tel Sultan. Military officials said that the fact that he was rescued from a tunnel by special forces showed that the IDF was still operating under the assumption that hostages could be in the area, but this was not considered a special rescue operation, like others that have been carried out using precise intelligence.
Four days after that, the bodies of the six murdered hostages were found, just 700 meters away from where al-Qadi was rescued.
“We didn’t prepare for this. We came here to defeat the Rafah Brigade, and still, we were a step away [from the hostages],” said Lt. Col. Yisgav Yisraeli, the commander of the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, from the entrance to the tunnel shaft where the six hostages were murdered.
“It’s a difficult feeling,” he added.
