The caliber of information on what is happening on the ground in Rafah is poor thanks to Israel’s pogrom on journalists. Israel has had the good luck of Rafah reporting being crowded out by bigger-seeming events: the prospect of ICC arrest warrants being issued against Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant; Ireland, Norway and Spain announcing they intend to recognize Palestine; and the death of Iran’s president Raisi. Nevertheless, we’ll hazard an update.
A new Wall Street Journal story describes how far Israel has gotten in its plan to take control of the crossings into Egypt in Rafah. Egypt says Israel has taken over 70% of what had been a demilitarized zone; Israel says it has only about half (Anadolu Agency says its sources say half). From the Journal:
The [Israeli] military has doubled the number of brigades operating in the Rafah area…
Israel says taking control of the corridor is critical to its goal of defeating the militant group that it says is holding out in Rafah… But doing so could jeopardize the country’s 45-year-old peace treaty with Egypt, which limits the number of troops both countries can deploy in the area. The Israeli Defense Ministry declined to comment on whether it aims to take full control of the southern frontier or has a timeline for doing so….
The Israeli operations that began in Rafah earlier this month have also reduced the entry of aid through two key southern border crossings to a trickle and displaced some 800,000 people from Rafah, where more than a million had taken shelter from fighting elsewhere in the strip.
A fresh Associated Press account reports the UN has given up on aid deliveries to Rafah:
The United Nations suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Tuesday due to a lack of supplies and an untenable security situation caused by Israel’s expanding military operation. The U.N. warned that humanitarian operations across the territory were nearing collapse…
The U.N.’s World Food Program said it was running out of food for central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people are now living.
“Humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse,” said Abeer Etefa, a WFP spokesperson. If food and other supplies don’t resume entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said.
But the same story notes that Biden Administration is fine with the collateral damage from the Rafah operation:
A senior United States official said Israel has addressed many of the Biden administration’s concerns about a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah aimed at rooting out Hamas fighters there…
The official said the administration stopped short of greenlighting the Israeli invasion plan, but said Israeli officials’ changes to the planning suggested they were taking the American administration’s concerns seriously.
In case you still harbored doubts:
This is Rafah right now. The Biden admin will say it’s a “limited operation” because they already expressed opposition to a “major” operation. The media will repeat this and say Israel is addressing US “concerns.”
This is literally how propaganda works.pic.twitter.com/uGnc6UmzPO
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) May 21, 2024
The rationale for Israel violating its agreements with Egypt to do so was that this move would enable it to rout out what remained of Hamas. Yet Hamas has reasserted itself in northern Gaza, so it seems questionable that Israel could kill all that many Hamas fighters in a Rafah operation. However, Hamas famously has many supply tunnels into Egypt, and Israel intends to destroy them.
But the most immediate effect is cutting off trucked-in aid supplies. From Middle East Eye:
Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt has been closed for two weeks, after Israel seized the terminal in a ground operation and Cairo refused to open it from the Sinai side….
The Rafah crossing is located in an area designated as demilitarised in the 1979 treaty and a 2005 agreement between Egypt and Israel.
The peace treaty and the 2005 accord allow troops to be deployed in the crossing area only after mutual agreement between the two sides….
For the past two weeks, Israel and Egypt have been trading blame for the closure of the Rafah crossing, and aid trucks carrying food and medical supplies for Palestinians in Gaza have been piling up on the Egyptian side of the border.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry on Monday said that the Rafah crossing is closed due to the presence of troops and operations in the vicinity of the terminal, which he said threaten the safety of aid convoys.
Israel is blaming Egypt for failing to cooperate with respect to the Rafah crossings, although it’s not clear what cooperation is supposed to amount to.
According to Twitter, Israel is having great success in wrecking Hamas tunnels. But we heard that sort of thing when Israel first invaded Gaza. Hamas is believed to have a simply ginormous network, so even if Israel blows up quite a few, it has no idea what proportion of the total that represents. Indeed, a different Middle East Eye account describes how the US is vexed by Israel’s poor military showing:
The top-ranking general in the US criticised on Monday Israel’s military strategy in Gaza, warning that the failure of Israeli forces to both secure captured territory and eliminate Hamas from northern Gaza is hampering its ability to achieve its military objectives.
“Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilise it,” said General Charles Brown, who chairs the joint chiefs of staff, as reported by Politico…
Brown said after Israel “cleared they didn’t hold, and so that allows your adversary then to repopulate in areas if you’re not there”.
Remember, this comes from the same US military that thought that the great Ukraine counteroffensive, with no air support, would be a smashing success because those inferior Slavs would run away as soon as they saw Western weapons in action.
Brown either does not understand or chooses not to understand how the Hamas tunnel system operates. As both Alastair Crooke and Scott Ritter have explained, many of the tunnels were built for one-time use and are even pulled down afterwards. It’s also an obvious ploy to booby trap them. Flattening the buildings over them has also served to create terrain that it ideal for Hamas surprise attacks and the rubble dampens the effectiveness of bunker-busters. So it isn’t hard to imagine that Hamas has a tunnel network remaining that is too deep for even the heaviest nasty bombs to collapse.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of Israeli triumphalism on display:
The IDF just sent its 5th brigade into Rafah.
That is 10 brigades in Gaza as we speak, a record number of IDF soldiers since the war began.
What’s that smell?
Oh, it’s the smell of the end of the genocidal Islamic terrorist organization we call Hamas.
Their end is near.… pic.twitter.com/Lyi5cyiKHy
— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) May 22, 2024
Israeli forces take down 130 Hamas terrorists in East Rafah.
Hundreds of tunnel shafts and rocket launchers destroyed.
Hamas is having a bad day. pic.twitter.com/OvjLlxJ48H
— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) May 20, 2024
– Egypt a month ago: ISRAEL MUST NOT ENTER RAFAH
– Israel enters Rafah, finds 700 tunnels, 50 of which cross into Egypt
– Egypt: uhh… https://t.co/QWnxxzkOIw— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) May 22, 2024
The Middle East Eye story cited earlier on food supplies confirms that the pier-for-aid-deliveries gimmick is an abject failure:
According to US officials, the new floating pier, which became operational on Friday and is called “Trident”, will help with the additional delivery of 90-150 truckloads to Gaza each day.
So far, only 10 truckloads have been transferred to a UN World Food Programme warehouse in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah on Friday. The UN says 500 trucks of aid are needed daily to address the acute needs of Gaza, where famine is spreading.
“The pier is more performative than effective and Rafah remains an essential piece of the puzzle to deliver sufficient aid and avoid a further deterioration in the already terrible conditions on the ground,” said Fabiani.
No aid was received on Sunday or Monday, a UN official told Reuters, while only five trucks reached the warehouse on Saturday and 11 were stopped and emptied by starving Palestinians on the way.
To give some context of how desperate conditions are in Gaza, from the New Arab in Palestinians surviving on 3% of minimum daily water needs in Gaza:
Some Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are surviving on just three percent of the global minimum standard for daily water usage, two humanitarian groups have said, as Israel’s war has decimated the enclave’s water infrastructure.
A lack of clean water and sanitation facilities have led to an increase in diseases and infections among Gaza’s civilian population, particularly children, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)…
A deterioration of water, sanitation and hygiene conditions “have significantly increased acute watery diarrhoea among children under five, while other water-borne and communicable diseases such as Hepatitis are proliferating among families who cannot access sources of clean water,” the report found.
Families have been forced to build their own toilets, with hundreds of people using a single one, amounting to 30 times more than the minimum global standard, IRC and MAP said….
A BBC satellite analysis from earlier this month found that more than half of Gaza’s water treatment plants and sewage system have been damaged or destroyed by Israel’s heavy aerial and ground bombardment.
For months, families have been forced to spend hours queuing up with plastic bottles and gallons at water tanks, and then make efforts to ration supplies.
In other words, the Rafah operation appears to have the same primary effect as post IDF initiatives: to intensify the pace of the genocide. And by that measure, it is succeeding admirably.