In the fields bordering the abandoned kibbutz of Nirim, on the edge of Gaza, the Israeli army keeps countless bulldozers and armored excavators in reserve, alongside its tanks. The mechanics are under great strain maintaining these machines, covered in mud, and their efforts sum up the state of operations quite well: in Gaza, the army is digging. She searches the basement in search of Hamas tunnels, without regard for the Palestinian buildings that she crushes, leaving behind only a pile of ruins.
This Sunday, February 4, the armored vehicle which takes us on a mud road towards Khan Younes, a town in the south of Gaza, crosses the fenced border of the enclave through one of the breaches pierced there by Hamas commandos, on October 7, 2023. The army monopolizes the fields which extend under this fence, where only rare Palestinian farmers were authorized to go before the war. It also razes buildings, beyond the old walkway of the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas. Israel intends to depopulate a ” buffer ” one kilometer deep in the enclave.
For two months the soldiers have been maneuvering frighteningly slowly in Khan Younes: it is the longest infantry deployment of this war. Seen from the narrow peepholes and surveillance screens of the armored vehicle, the incongruous are the buildings still standing and which appear unscathed: the green and white minaret of a mosque standing like a cypress on the ruins, a hangar whose whiteness dazzled. The rest is ripped open or flattened. Embankments of cleared rubble rise on either side of the path, several meters high.
Military censorship
We will not see the hospitals that the army is besieging nearby; nor the hundreds of city residents arrested and passed out in Israeli prisons; nor the outskirts of the refugee camp where thousands of desperate Palestinians crowd, to the west of the city. This February 4, General Dan Goldfuss guides half a dozen European and American media, including a journalist from an evangelical Christian television channel, committed to the Israeli cause, who enthusiastically repeats each word of the officer in front of his camera : “The general said…” The military censor demanded to read our article, and did not request changes. For four months, the army has banned the press from going alone to the enclave, where it has killed dozens of Gazan colleagues.
At the head of the 98e division, Dan Goldfuss is the latest officer to lead a massive deployment of troops, under intense air support, while Israel only talks about an impossible truce with Hamas, which would force the army to end its war, in order to obtain the release of 136 hostages held in Gaza. A second division is content to besiege the metropolis of Gaza, to the north. She sent most of her reservists home. She is carrying out counter-insurgency operations, in what is already a post-war period for her, and which looks fiercely like the continuation of the conflict in the eyes of the hungry inhabitants of the city.
You have 65% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.