From Hamas stronghold to wasteland: What does it mean to defeat the enemy?

It’s a throwaway phrase politicians and military leaders use often when talking about the goals of the Gaza war: degrade Hamas’s capabilities so they can’t carry out another October 7 attack.

Most Israelis hear that, shake their head in agreement but don’t really know what that means or looks like.

A four-hour IDF-organized visit Monday with a group of Israeli journalists to what remains of the outskirts of Gaza City’s Shejaia neighborhood – once a Hamas stronghold – helped clarify the picture.

The degrading of Hamas’s ability to carry out another October 7 means bulldozing down any structures, industrial or residential, within a kilometer of the border fence. It means destroying city blocks to get to tunnels. And it means uprooting Hamas tunnels – not merely blowing up their shafts, but digging deep down into the earth to completely uproot those tunnels.

“We are working intensely to destroy all Hamas’s infrastructure to make sure that it will not be able to reestablish itself for years,” said Lt.-Col Gideon Ellastam, the deputy commander of the Paratroopers Brigade. “We are clearing out the territory, both above and below the ground, to take away their capabilities. The objective is to create a completely different security situation to enable the Israeli residents of the border communities to return home.”

Ellastam spoke on a crest just outside of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz devastated in Hamas’s October 7 attack, looking west toward Shejaia, about a kilometer away. The IDF, which is concluding its second round of operations in the Shejaia area – after first operating there in December – said it will return there a third time if need be.

Asked whether it is not frustrating to have to return and fight Hamas in an area from which they were already cleared out once before, Ellastam said the enemy is coming back to a fundamentally different place and has to operate in a completely different manner than before.

This visit to the outskirts of Shejaia took place on a day when inside Israel the public discussion was dominated by the hostage negotiations, whether a statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was intended to make those negotiations more difficult, and as the television studios continued to feature former IDF officers warning that the IDF was merely treading water inside Gaza. However, among the troops on peak alert inside Gaza, who had just destroyed two Hamas tunnels that morning, these concerns and criticisms seemed distant. The soldiers remained focused on their immediate tasks and operational objectives.

“We are not dealing with negotiations, but rather with the objectives that the general staff and the political echelon are giving us – we leave the negotiations to them,” Ellastam said. “We are continuously working at a high level operationally.”

The public, for the most part, doesn’t hear many details about those day-to-day operations or only does so when tragedy strikes and a soldier is killed. Even then the laconic statement from the IDF is that a soldier was killed in fighting in the central, north, or south of Gaza. Little detail is given of when, how, or in what capacity.

One of those soldiers killed last week was Capt. Elay Elisha Lugasi, 21, from Kiryat Shmona, a team commander in the 7th “Storm from the Golan” Armored Brigade’s 75th Battalion operating inside Shejaia. Three other soldiers from the same unit were seriously wounded during a raid inside the neighborhood.

What it means to return to normal

ANOTHER TERM often thrown about is to “defeat Hamas.” Asked what that term means for him, Ellastam, who grew up in Talmei Yosef, not far from the Gaza border, said it means destroying every defensive position the organization has, clearing the area of terrorists, and destroying all terrorist infrastructure above and below ground to create a situation where “the enemy can no longer operate” from that area.

As someone who grew up close to the Gaza border himself, Ellastam knows the sights one should be seeing at this time of year in these communities. “Right now we should be seeing tractors in the fields, workers picking watermelons, and kids playing. This will return.”

Enabling residents of those communities to return, he said, is the source of the IDF’s strength and its high morale, which he said remains high even though there is talk in Israel of the IDF running out of targets and now making little headway inside Gaza. That type of discourse does not impact him, he said, because he tries to listen to as little of it as possible.

One of the recent successes of his soldiers fighting in this area was the uncovering and destruction of two major tunnels.

Ellastam took reporters to the site of one of the tunnels, about 800 m. from the border fence, just east of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and Kfar Azza. In 2014, Sgt. Oren Shaul was killed about 150 m. away and kidnapped into a tunnel nearby.

This particular tunnel, he said, originated deep within Shejaia and ran to the border fence. The IDF has known about its existence for years, and hit it extensively from the air in the past. Only operational control of the area right now, however, makes it possible for the IDF to dig up the tunnel. A similar tunnel from Shejaia was also used in 2014 to penetrate Israel, where terrorists emerged inside Israel and killed five soldiers.

In order to destroy this tunnel, it was necessary to destroy the blocks of buildings that sat upon it, which the IDF did. From the area where the tunnel stood, a look westward shows nothing but rubble and destroyed structures – not even the shells of buildings, but rather the  sight of buildings completely crumbled, only slabs of concrete showing.

“It is important to understand that the infrastructure here was built over years. It is not something that you can destroy in a couple of months, or even three – it takes time,” Ellastam said. “There are topographical issues involved, engineering challenges, manpower challenges.”

While there were few residents in the area in Shejaia where the IDF was operating in recent days, the area is not sterile, Ellastam said, with bursts of machine gun fire and plumes of black smoke in the background attesting to just that. “But clearly, those who chose to remain in a war zone understand they are liable to get hurt,” he said.

Destroying infrastucture

CAPT. "A," FROM the elite Yahalom unit in the engineering corps that has been extremely active during this war neutralizing tunnels, explained that the bulldozed pit upon which we were standing once housed residential structures. He explained that this particular tunnel was used to bring terrorists close to the border without being detected. The shafts into the tunnels, he said, were near schools, mosques, and preschools in Shejaia.

It is this type of destruction of the Hamas terror infrastructure, he said, that will be necessary in order for residents of the Israeli communities bordering Gaza to feel secure enough to return home.

“Our goal is to make sure that they can,” he said. He said that the tunnels were a Hamas strategic asset meant to ensure the terrorist organization’s survival, adding that it is hard to believe that the people who lived in the buildings above the tunnels did not know they were there.

Lt.-Col. Ron Sayag commands the 75th Battalion in the 7th Armored Brigade, which was involved in the destruction of the two tunnels early Monday morning that made it briefly into an Army radio news bulletin on Tuesday afternoon. He pointed out that the area from which he was talking was an area – just a few minute's drive from the border – where the IDF was afraid to go in 2014. Now it has complete operational control.

“When I see that we are hitting their infrastructure, that gives me and my soldiers a feeling that we are doing something important, that will shape the way things look here not for just two or three years, but for dozens of years to come.”

In addition to destroying Hamas’s capabilities, his battalion was involved over the last two months both in recovering the bodies of three hostages it found in a tunnel, thanks to intelligence information they worked upon immediately, and in protecting the security forces involved in the rescue of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv a month ago.

Being part of that, he said, was the most emotional experience he has encountered during the war. “When you hear on the army radio that the hostages are alive and in our hands, you feel the emotion in your body – you feel like you did something important.”

Sayag said that the current disagreements in Israel are something that he does not deal with as battalion commander. “Personally, I yearn for unity, and that is also the message you hear from the soldiers. There are engineering corps soldiers in this brigade who have been fighting for eight months, tank units that have been in heavy fighting.” Regardless of internal disagreements inside Israel, he said his objective is “to defeat Hamas, return the hostages, and bring my soldiers home safely.”

His deputy, Maj. Alon Uzan, said that while the current arguments inside the country do not hurt morale, especially that of the younger soldiers, it “certainly doesn’t help it.” He said that the sense of unity that was so apparent inside the tents and the tanks once Israel went to war remains.

“Actually, you had that unity before October 7 as well,” he said. “All those who were talking about rifts inside the army, it’s nonsense. The army is stronger than that.”

Uzan, covered in the dust kicked up by the heavy IDF vehicles around him, lives on trendy Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv. Asked if it is not jarring when he goes home to see life go on in Tel Aviv – people eating out, enjoying themselves – he replied that the transition is indeed challenging: “Here we’re in a war, and people are getting killed and wounded, and then you go out and see people living their lives, going abroad, enjoying themselves. But we are here precisely so that people can continue to do that.”

Sayag put it somewhat differently. “I really feel we are in the War of Independence. How does the last line of Hatikvah go? ‘To be a free nation in our own land.’ This is exactly what this is about. I want us to be a free people in our own land.”