Journalists get a glimpse inside Israel’s invasion as battles go on. / Israel gives Gazans a four-hour window to move south.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/05/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

 

Journalists get a glimpse inside Israel’s invasion as battles go on.

 

The wall of a school had shattered into rubble. The minaret of a mosque was tilting to one side. The roof of a beachfront villa had vanished, leaving a maroon sofa exposed to the elements.

 

Along the northern coastline of Gaza on Saturday afternoon, these were the signs of battle between Hamas, the Palestinian militia that controls the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army, which had for eight days tried to oust Hamas from power.

 

Israeli military leaders brought a small group of foreign journalists into northern Gaza on Saturday for four hours to witness the extent of the advance. A reporter for The New York Times was among them.

 

Thousands of troops began their incursion down the coastline on Oct. 27, one part of a three-pronged invasive force that aims to vanquish Hamas, which led a brazen raid on Israel last month that killed roughly 1,400 people.

 

Eight days later, the Israeli army has fought its way several miles to the south, reaching the outskirts of Gaza City, Hamas’s stronghold, and establishing control over the northern stretch of Gaza’s coastal road.

 

Less than a month ago, the northern coastline of Gaza was a quiet seafront flecked here and there with beach resorts and hotels. On Saturday, it was a giant Israeli military camp.

 

Long lines of infantry marched south along the road, blowing plumes of dust into the air. In the sand dunes east of the road, long rows of tanks and armored vehicles dominated the landscape, stretching toward the horizon.

 

Many buildings were wrecked, their walls sprayed with bullet holes. Some were most likely hit from the air during an Israeli bombing campaign that has killed more than 9,000 Gazans, according to Gaza’s health authority, which is controlled by Hamas.

 

Palestinian residents had fled south, abandoning the seafront to the Israeli soldiers and a few stray dogs and cats.

 

An Israeli officer accompanying the journalists, Lt. Col. Iddo Ben-Anat, projected an image of quiet confidence.

 

Hamas had been routed here, the colonel said, forced out from its bases in the mosque with the tilting minaret and the school with the shattered wall.

 

“It’s like catching a mouse,” Colonel Ben-Anat said of the enemy. “You have to find him. You know he’s there. You don’t know where he is — but you know when you catch him, he’s done.”

 

Nearby, groups of soldiers gathered around portable camping stoves, boiling sweet corn and carrots, chatting and joking. Several sported well-groomed mustaches — an incongruous nod to Movember, an annual global fund-raising campaign in which men grow mustaches throughout the month of November.

 

All the political divisions in Israel of the past year — in which thousands of military reservists had threatened to refuse to serve in protest of the Israeli government — had vanished, the colonel said. Many of his men were reservists.

 

“United, together,” said Colonel Ben-Anat.

 

But drowning out these expressions of bravado were the sounds of an unfinished and undecided war.

 

Even as some soldiers cooked and rested, others had their guns drawn, scanning the horizon for assailants. At any moment, the colonel said, Hamas fighters might emerge from hidden shafts that lead to a vast underground tunnel network, hundreds of miles along, and ambush the Israeli troops.

 

Gunfire rattled constantly, and munitions flew regularly overhead.

 

Shortly after the journalists entered Gaza through a hole in the wall lining its perimeter, a mortar shell landed close to the armored vehicle that carried them south.

 

A few minutes later, a roadside bomb exploded as the vehicle passed by, creating a brief fireball and sending sand toward the sky.

 

Another barrage of mortar shells landed near the journalists after they got closer to the front line.

 

To reach the front, the journalists drove in a convoy of five tanks and two armored vehicles. A reporter for The Times traveled in an armored vehicle known as an Eitan. It had no windows: To see his surroundings, the driver looked at a digital screen that showed a live video of the road ahead.

 

Palestinian journalists have not had such protection; dozens have been killed in airstrikes since the start of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

 

To truly rout Hamas, Israel will need to capture all of Gaza, the colonel said.

 

Bloodier battles await the Israelis in Gaza City, where Hamas fighters are entrenched in their subterranean fortifications and are thought to be planning many more ambushes.

 

Analysts say that such fighting could cause catastrophic civilian losses — an outcome Israel says it is trying to avoid.

 

“We do our best to destroy Hamas only, without harming the civilians,” said Colonel Ben-Anat. “We’ll think 10 times before we do something.”

 

But for the civilians in Gaza City, who have witnessed one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century, the Israeli army’s approach is terrifying.

 

Saher Abu Adgham, 37, a Palestinian graphic designer, had been searching the streets of Gaza City for firewood to boil some rice. As dusk approached, he bedded down at home in case the army advanced at nightfall.

 

“I am afraid to go out one night and meet a tank,” Mr. Abu Adgham said in a phone interview.

 

With mobile networks often out of service, other residents of Gaza City were trying to assess the Israeli advance by listening to the sound of the gunfire.

 

“We don’t have internet to listen to the news and know what is happening — but we can hear it,” said Majdi Ahmed, 32, a taxi driver taking shelter in a hospital in the city.

 

“Now I can hear the shooting,” Mr. Ahmed said in a voice message. “Seems they are now fighting.”

 

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Cairo, Abu Bakr Bashir from London and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.

 

— Ronen Bergman reporting from northern Gaza

 

Israel gives Gazans a four-hour window to move south.

 

As Israel’s military moves to surround the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City, it again urged civilians in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to head south on Sunday toward what it described as safer areas of the enclave, and said it would offer a four-hour window to do so.

 

Gazans will be allowed safe passage on Salah al-Din Road, the strip’s main north-south highway, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. local time, Avichay Adraee, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said on social media. He said Israel had offered a similar window on Saturday but its forces that attempted to open the road were attacked by Hamas, which fired mortar and antitank shells.

 

The attack, which could not immediately be independently verified, was another example of Hamas using civilians as “human shields,” Mr. Adraee said.

 

For nearly a month, Israel has been urging Palestinians in northern Gaza to leave their homes and head south, closer to the Egyptian border, as it tries to destroy Hamas. In retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault that killed some 1,400 people in Israel, the Israeli military has relentlessly bombarded the Gaza Strip, including in the southern areas it has described as safer for civilians.

 

Some Palestinians have refused to heed Israel’s warnings and have stayed in the north. Others doubt Israeli assurances, and as the evacuation window opened on Sunday, it was not clear if many Gazans would attempt to make the journey. Residents also say that Israeli strikes have left craters on the highway, and disruptions in phone and internet connections mean that many in Gaza might not be aware of Israel’s latest announcement.

 

Israel has faced criticism for demanding that civilians leave their homes, which worsened the humanitarian crisis in the Hamas-run enclave as hundreds of thousands of people fled. More than 9,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

 

The announcement of a brief window for evacuations did not appear to be the type of “humanitarian pause” that U.S. officials have urged Israel to observe in order to allow more aid into blockaded Gaza. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would not consider a cease-fire until the roughly 240 people Hamas and other armed groups took hostage in the Oct. 7 attacks were released — a tough stance that appeared to be a rebuff to the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, whom he had just met with.

 

While humanitarian aid has been slow to enter Gaza, there was some relief last week for the thousands of foreign passport holders and others hoping to evacuate from Gaza to Egypt. More than 1,100 people left Gaza for Egypt on Thursday and Friday, according to United Nations estimates. There were no reports of people moving across the border on Saturday, the U.N. said.

 

Israeli ground forces entered Gaza a little over a week ago, and have fought their way to the outskirts of Gaza City, which was the most populous part of the strip before the war.

 

— Vivek Shankar