Israel recently achieved “operational control” over the Philadelphi Corridor, the land border between Gaza and Egypt from the Gaza side, a potentially significant military maneuver in its effort to defeat Hamas.
The buffer zone is about nine miles long and several hundred yards wide and extends the length of Gaza’s southern border from the Mediterranean Sea to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which is near where Gaza’s, Egypt’s, and Israel’s boundaries meet.
Israeli forces have uncovered roughly 20 tunnels that cross from Gaza into Egypt, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel Defense Forces spokesman, said on Wednesday, which Hamas has been accused of using to smuggle weapons, goods, and people into and out of the strip undetected.
Hagari said Hamas turned the Philadelphi Corridor into a “central Hamas hotbed of terror.”
“We also found a subterranean tunnel system near the border with Egypt. We found 13 kilometers of Hamas’s underground tunnel network and around 20 Hamas tunnels that Hamas built intentionally next to the border with Egypt underneath Rafah as a part of Hamas’s human shield strategy,” he said. “Inside the tunnels, we found dozens of weapons including anti-tank missiles, AK-47s, explosives, and grenades. Our forces are operating to dismantle the Rafah brigade.”
Israeli forces have killed about 300 Hamas fighters in Rafah so far, some of whom were hiding in the tunnels, Hagari noted.
Israel’s control over the Philadelphi Corridor could increase tension with Egypt. One Egyptian soldier was killed over the weekend while Israel and Egyptian troops exchanged gunfire at the Rafah border crossing. No Israeli forces were injured or killed during the incident.
The IDF’s announcement regarding the Philadelphi Corridor came amid intensifying international condemnation regarding a recent strike in Rafah, which is just north of the corridor, that killed roughly 45 people. The IDF is investigating what happened, though its initial findings point to a secondary explosion as the cause of those deaths.
The White House said the tragic strike did not cross the red line set by President Joe Biden regarding Israeli operations in Rafah. Biden and his administration adamantly opposed a full ground invasion of Rafah, and Biden threatened to withhold future offensive military aid to Israel if it went ahead with one.
“What I will tell you is that what we have seen is essentially, so far, what the Israelis said they were going to do. They were going to close down the crossing to shut off the revenue to Hamas that comes across that crossing, at least for a while, and they were going to go after Hamas terrorists in as precise a way as possible — that they were not going to, quote, unquote, ‘smash into Rafah’ with a lot of ground forces,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. “As you and I speak here today, that is still the case.”
Even though Israel is seemingly meeting the United States’s requests for how to operate in Rafah, the tragic incident over the weekend demonstrates the inherent risks involved in operating in such densely populated areas.
“We’ve heard from the Israelis, but again, absent a complete investigation, I can’t verify any of this — that small-diameter weapons were used in a targeted fashion to go after specific terrorist leaders of Hamas. Again, I can’t vouch for that in this moment. We have to see what the investigation shows,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday. “But just assuming for a moment that that’s the case, that that’s what happened, I think we also see that even limited, focused, targeted attacks designed to deal with terrorists who’ve killed innocent civilians and are plotting to kill more — even those kind of operations can have terrible, horrific, unintended consequences.”
The U.S., United Nations, and several Western governments have warned for months that Israeli military operations in Rafah could result in devastating numbers of civilian casualties. More than a million Palestinians fled to Rafah during earlier portions of the war, though Israeli forces have since evacuated parts of the surrounding areas.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that more than 945,000 people were displaced from Rafah between May 6 and 26.
An Israeli official said Wednesday the war will likely extend into 2025.
“We expect another seven months of fighting in order to deepen the accomplishments and achieve what we have defined as ‘the destruction of the governmental and military capabilities of Hamas,’” Israeli national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said in an interview with Kan Reshet Bet radio.
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The U.S. has pushed Israel to come up with a viable plan for what will happen in Gaza once the war is over, and Blinken did so again on Wednesday.
“In the absence of a plan for the day after, there won’t be a day after,” he said. “And this is where we need to go. And we need to get as quickly as possible a plan for the day after that does not leave Israel responsible for Gaza, which it says it does not want to be. But if it is, it will simply have an enduring insurgency on its hands for as far as one can see into the future. If not, Hamas will be left in charge, which is unacceptable. We’ll have chaos, lawlessness, and a vacuum that eventually will be filled again by Hamas or maybe something, if it’s possible to imagine, even worse — jihadis.”