Israel minimizes the importance of Rafah while pushing Hamas away from the Egyptian border

Israeli officials believe that the southern Gaza city of Rafah is “not as important” for Hamas as other bastions where the Israel Defense Forces have conducted major ground operations, according to a top Israeli military spokesman.

“We took an operational plan for the war for approval by the political echelon,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said at a conference in Tel Aviv. “Within this plan, we mapped out the war, which was estimated to be about a year of fighting. Within this year, we saw that we would first of all deal with Hamas’s greatest centers of power, which are mostly in northern Gaza and Khan Yunis.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has maintained, in recent months, that Israel cannot achieve the required victory over Hamas without a major ground operation in Rafah. Yet Hagari’s remarks may leave open the possibility for a more creative solution in the face of sustained U.S. opposition to a ground campaign.

“We will deal with Rafah in the way which is right for us,” Hagari said. “I want to tell the public so that they do not delude themselves: Even after we deal with Rafah, there will be terror. Hamas will move northwards and try to reconstitute itself, even in the next few days. In every place Hamas returns to, including in northern and central Gaza, we will return to operating.”

That stated exercise in the management of public expectations coincides with a series of high-stakes military and diplomatic operations. Israeli forces moved on Tuesday to seize the Palestinian side of the Egypt-Gaza border near Rafah, citing “intelligence information that terrorists were using the crossing area for terror purposes” — a justification that dovetails with the suspicions of analysts who see the area as a key supply route for terrorists to obtain weapons and supplies from abroad.

“The IDF was, however, operating around the Philadelphi corridor or the border area between Gaza and Egypt,” Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said on a Wednesday broadcast. “The best interpretation is that Israel took the Philadelphi corridor so that Hamas loses its lifeline to Egypt.”

That maneuver drew an immediate objection from Cairo.

“This dangerous escalation threatens the lives of more than 1 million Palestinians who depend primarily on this crossing, as it is the main lifeline of the Gaza Strip, and the safe outlet for the wounded and sick to exit to receive treatment, and for the entry of humanitarian and relief aid to our Palestinian brothers in Gaza,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tuesday.

That statement is part of a carefully managed response to the IDF, as “authorities on both sides of the border took steps to clear the area before the operation,” according to an Egyptian media outlet called Mada Masr that emphasized that “instructions were issued to media outlets” by Egyptian authorities on how to describe the events.

“Mada Masr reviewed a copy of the guidelines, which included a ban on using the word ‘Rafah’ without specifying it as ‘Palestinian’ and emphasized that outlets should say that ‘evacuating the city of Rafah of its residents could lead to serious consequences,’” the report reads. “The directives also said that outlets should highlight the ongoing functionality of the Rafah crossing from the Egyptian side, stressing that the crossing is operating normally with continued entry of individuals and aid.”

In parallel, Israel and Hamas are exchanging proposals about the terms of a deal for a ceasefire and hostage release, a pact that has proven elusive as Hamas is using the hostages as leverage to demand an end to the war and a full withdrawal from Gaza, while Netanyahu faces pressure from his hard-right coalition allies to prioritize the military campaign against Hamas.

“If we want the hostages back, and we do, I see no chance of getting that total victory without them,” former IDF chief of staff Aviv Kochavi was quoted as saying by Haaretz on Wednesday in a report that emphasized his doubt that “there’s a way to bring back the hostages without stopping the war, for now.”

Israeli officials have said previously that ending the war without a Rafah operation would amount to a failure.

“[There was] a difference of opinion of going in on the ground from the get-go, and I asked the IDF chief of staff and the war cabinet just one question: Can we achieve our objective of dismantling Hamas has military capabilities without going in on a ground operation? And the answer was no,” Israeli strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer said during a March interview with Dan Senor. “And the answer now when you say, ‘Can we destroy and dismantle Hamas military capabilities without going in an operation and Rafah?’ The answer is no.”

Hagari said Israel delayed the Rafah operation in recent months because “the operational conditions necessary to carry it out did not exist.” U.S. officials, while urging Netanyahu not to undertake such a campaign for fear of unacceptable civilian casualties, allowed for a distinction between the seizure of the border areas and the full-scale Rafah campaign.

“This appears to be a limited operation, but of course, much of that depends on what comes next,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday. “They have said, I think, quite clearly, it’s no secret that they want to conduct a major military operation there. We have made clear that we oppose such an operation. And separately, but of course, it’s related, we are trying to achieve an agreement that would bring an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

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Hagari suggested that “Gaza is perhaps one of the most difficult battlefields in the world, in terms of its population density and the tunnels which Hamas dug underground.” For Schanzer, “the main event” is located on the border, where the IDF may be poised to interdict major tunnel corridors.

“So all eyes now on the IDF engineers: If they start digging for tunnels, the Israelis will be one step closer to destroying the terrorist group that launched the attacks of [Oct. 7, 2023], not to mention the regional war that Israel has little choice but to finish now for your headlines,” he said.