RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Miles inside of Gaza, there are no sounds of war.

It certainly looks like a war zone, however. Almost no buildings are left standing in Rafah, and what was a city of almost 200,000 two years ago is now a sandy wasteland of broken concrete, twisted metal and packs of feral dogs sniffing hungrily around the ruins.

But the frequent explosions and buzzing of drones in the enclave since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, seem to be in the past.

Judging by how it is operating, the Israel Defense Forces believes it has total control over the area. Civilian sedans and pickup trucks drive along the Philadelphi Route on the border with Egypt, stopping at military bases in what was once the Tel Sultan neighborhood.

It is so quiet that one can hear the waves lapping up against the Mediterranean shore dozens of meters away, beyond the UAE-funded black pipeline pumping desalinated water from Egypt to Gaza.

The placidity is broken not by gunshots but the sounds of construction equipment. Compactors flatten the sand and dump trucks sullenly lug dirt and rocks out of a massive rectangular enclosure bounded by sand berms and concrete guard posts.

Two white armored vehicles with bearded American security guards, labeled “4” and “5”, drive out of the compound.

Israel is building two new aid distribution sites, which according to the military will be handed over to the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the coming days.

The IDF invited journalists to visit the sites on Wednesday before they become operational “once security conditions are met,” in the words of a military spokesman.

The GHF began operating in May as a way to distribute aid while bypassing Hamas.

According to Israel, assistance in Gaza was being siphoned off by Hamas, which sold the goods on the black market to fund its activities, including recruiting new fighters to rebuild its depleted forces. GHF was the US-Israeli solution.

However, the organization has faced global blowback over chaos at distribution points and reported near-daily deadly shootings on routes near the aid sites. The IDF disputes figures from the Hamas-run health ministry on the number killed, though it has said troops fired warning shots at crowds.

Aid organizations and much of the international community are opposed to the GHF’s aid system, as it requires Gazans to walk long distances in order to pick up a box of dry food products that need to be prepared, though cooking fuel and equipment are scarce in the Strip.

The sites under construction are meant to address those issues.

They are designed to be “as safe as possible, as short of a distance as possible, for the trucks, and for the people coming in,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told The Times of Israel.

The first row of buildings in the al-Mawasi area — to which Israel has told civilians in Gaza City to evacuate — are visible from both sites. Reaching the more northerly of the sites would take 5-10 minutes by foot from the edge of the coastal humanitarian area, said Shoshani, and no more than 20 minutes to the one closer to the Egyptian border.

The IDF has learned “a lot of lessons” from the rollout of the four original GHF sites, added Shoshani, and are implementing them in order to make the process safer for Gazan civilians and IDF troops.

Israel has changed “the way we arrange the distribution sites, the way we arrange our forces around them,” he said. The flow of foot traffic through the sites will be clearer and smoother, Shoshani promised, and changes in the placement and height of sand berms and concrete walls will protect American security guards working for GHF.

The IDF is also trying to avoid repeated instances since May in which hungry civilians veered off the defined routes and came under fire from IDF forces.

There are new fences and concrete walls “making it very clear where the routes are, where it’s safe to go, where you’re supposed to go, and making sure that  people don’t approach troops,” Shoshani told The Times of Israel.

“The IDF is not in the sites,” he stressed. “No one has been shot in the sites by the IDF. The IDF is fighting terrorists around these sites.”

Shoshani conceded that “there were some cases where unidentified people were approaching IDF forces and IDF forces had to act against them.”

“The IDF is not targeting anyone picking up food.”

The construction of the new sites, and the IDF’s eagerness to highlights its humanitarian efforts to Israeli and international press, come as the result of a strategically disastrous Israeli decision to declare a halt to all aid entering the Gaza Strip in March.

“Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza, something we’ve done for the past 42 days,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on March 2. “We’ve done that because Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of Gaza from getting them.”

Over the ensuing two months, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza steadily worsened, as international criticism grew in proportion. It reached a crescendo in July as 28 Western allies, including the UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Italy, said in a joint statement that the war in Gaza “must end now,” arguing that civilian suffering had “reached new depths.”

A narrative of severe hunger took root as well. More than 100 aid organizations and human rights groups warned that mass starvation  was spreading in Gaza. Hundreds of rabbis worldwide signed a letter calling for Israel to stop using starvation as a “weapon of war.” Even the Israel Medical Association (IMA) sent letters to top defense officials calling for medical equipment and basic humanitarian conditions for Gazans.

Netanyahu and his government were forced to drastically change course. Israel is now boasting about the new measures it is taking to allow in aid — daily humanitarian pauses, aid corridors, airdrops and the lifting of limits on aid going into the Strip.

The Trump administration wanted to see the GHF expand as well. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in an August 6 interview that GHF sites would be scaled up from the three that currently exist to 16, and that they would operate 24 hours a day.

The expansion of the GHF operation beyond five sites will depend on decisions by “the international community and the political echelon,” Shoshani explained.

The two sites under construction are designed to operate around the clock, said Shoshani. They will be divided into distribution and unloading areas, he said. When food runs out in one area, civilians can be rerouted to a section at which trucks are unloading more packages, and begin receiving aid there. Meanwhile, more trucks will start replenishing the sections where supplies dried up.

The GHF says it has distributed over 161 million meals since it began operating in May, and almost 1.2 million meals on Wednesday alone.

“For more than 100 days now, our team has delivered aid to Palestinians in need,” said GHF Executive Director John Acree. “Over this time, our team has remained committed to the people we serve and focused on our mission to ensure that Gaza has access to critical aid. The consistency of our distributions would not be possible without the humanitarians who put their hearts and souls into this work day in and day out.”

“While complexities of distributing aid in Gaza persist, our team has shown that it can overcome these challenges on a consistent basis,” he continued. “I continue to extend an invitation to all humanitarian groups to work with us and reliably feed Palestinians in need.”

For now, major aid groups are staying away from the GHF, saying it violates humanitarian principles.

“It is currently a very successful operation,” argued Shoshani. “There is a lot of good happening, a lot of food being distributed in the area.”

He said that Israel is not putting any limits on the amount of food coming into Gaza, “only that it is safe, not containing weapons.”

With that, the army bundled the reporters back into its Home Front Command vehicles, and set off past the destroyed Rafah Crossing for the ten minute drive back into Israel. The skeletal remains of Rafah gave way to two rows of border walls, rebuilt to the replace the barrier that Hamas blasted through on October 7, 2023.

Back in Israel, IDF reservists preparing to go back into Gaza milled about their cars, while tractors kicked up dust in the kibbutz fields trampled by invading terrorists two years ago.