From inside Rafah: The most unexpected battle of the war

Reporter’s Notebook: The ‘Post’ visits Rafah, where the status of 200 Hamas fighters has shaken the Gaza ceasefire, and the wider region.

Plumes of smoke floated up into the sky in several different spots at once.

Tank machine-gun fire periodically interrupted what otherwise would have been a quiet trip through the desert.

The Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob visits the IDF in Rafah, Gaza Strip, November 2025. (credit: YONAH JEREMY BOB)

It was the most unexpected and yet still highly impactful battle of the war.

Especially because it was the only ongoing battle, given that the war technically ended on October 4 or 10, depending on whether one goes by when the IDF invasion stopped in its tracks or when the ceasefire papers were signed.

Around 200 Hamas fighters had gotten unintentionally trapped in the Israeli half of Gaza in eastern Rafah when the ceasefire kicked in.

This is where The Jerusalem Post visited on Sunday, coming as close as 600 meters away from where the IDF eventually intercepted 17 Hamas terrorists who tried to escape from their tunnels a day earlier.

The IDF soldiers in the area, including Golani Brigade Commander Col. Adi Gonen, as well as the Nahal Brigade, killed 11 and arrested six.

Gonen told the Post and other media that the goal is “the central purpose is to locate the enemy and to destroy him or accept his surrender…Yesterday, 17 terrorists were killed or surrendered,” to a mix of Golani and Nahal forces.

The altercation led Hamas to threaten to abandon the ceasefire.

Further, the overall situation with the trapped Hamas forces there has shaken the region for weeks.

US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff made a special flight to Jerusalem to try to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow the Hamas fighters to cross into Hamas-controlled Gaza if they would be willing to turn over their weapons to the Egyptians.

The internal Israeli debate about whether to let the Hamas fighters go or not almost toppled the Israeli government, with threats from Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to do exactly that.

IDF chief sends out mixed messaging

There have been weeks of mixed messaging from IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir.

At times, he seemed ready to let the Hamas forces go if Netanyahu cut such a deal with Kushner, but at times, he seemed to insist that they must be killed or surrender to IDF personnel.

Based on the Post’s observations, the area where the remaining Hamas fighters are currently hiding and have been hiding underground has almost no above-ground structures.

IDF sources told the Post that they figured out several weeks ago, using various technological means to explore the tunnels in the area, that there was a large segment of Hamas fighters who had been trapped on the Israeli side.

Since then, they said that they have been slowly and meticulously cutting off underground areas where the Hamas terrorists might flee to.

The concept is to continuously narrow the underground area where they can maneuver and hide until they are effectively surrounded – similar to the way the IDF likes to surround a group of terrorists above ground.

IDF sources said they did not know why the Hamas terrorists did not flee into Hamas-controlled Gaza during the transition to the ceasefire.

It is possible that this group was cut off from communications with the central Hamas leadership and did not know they would run out of time and could be trapped by the IDF.

Another possibility is that they assumed that they had so much maneuvering space underground that they would eventually easily sneak past IDF patrols back in Hamas-controlled Gaza at a convenient moment, or that they would not be detected by the IDF at all and could remain in the area indefinitely.

It may be that they thought the IDF would let them go if they were found, so as not to anger Hamas and endanger the ceasefire, being that killing 200 fighters all in one place usually would not be considered consistent with a ceasefire. The loophole here is that no one from Hamas is supposed to be in areas controlled by Israel – certainly not armed.

Finally, maybe they thought that in order to get back more Israeli deceased bodies of hostages, the IDF would withdraw from the area, and they would return to rule above ground.

IDF finds Hamas terrorists short on food, water, lacking morale

However, at this point, the IDF sources described those Hamas terrorists whom they arrested as short on food and water and demoralized.

Those who have left the tunnels appear to have done so, feeling that they ran out of any other options and were about to be killed by IDF encroachments or starve.

They also probably did not realize how quickly IDF surveillance would zero in on them and bomb them with a Hermes 450 “Zik” drone.

Those who were arrested were passed on to the Shin Bet for interrogation.

The Shin Bet has many activities in the area, including dealing with those Palestinian groups similar to Abu Shabab, who are potentially ready to challenge Hamas for control of certain areas. The IDF does not generally deal with such groups.

Instead of the IDF considering further withdrawals, Israel used the fact that the IDF trapped such a large number of Hamas fighters in the area to pressure Hamas into complying with returning almost all of the deceased hostage bodies. Those bodies were “leverage” that it had hoped to hold onto to force more concessions from Israel.

Moreover, IDF sources said they believe dozens more Hamas fighters from the group had been killed and were buried under the ground, not far from where the Post and the IDF soldiers were walking through.

The IDF has said that it has attacked 60 targets, including 15 tunnel shafts, and destroyed hundreds of meters of tunnels.

Pressed about why the IDF was not using air strikes to kill all of the Hamas fighters, IDF sources said that they used air strikes wherever feasible. Yet, in some instances, air strikes would not necessarily kill the fighters, and in some instances, they wanted to track who was killed or arrested by seeing them up close.

IDF sources also said that they believed the Hamas terrorists from this group were well-trained and experienced and led by a relatively senior figure, likely a battalion commander.

This is in contrast to the majority of Hamas’s brand-new forces, who are younger, often minors, and have had little training.

Aside from the 200 Hamas fighters – who IDF sources say have likely dropped to dozens and who may be finished off within a period of weeks, a month or two at the most, if no diplomatic deal is cut to save them – IDF sources said that the broader Palestinian population is kilometers away.

IDF operations ongoign close to Palestinian population in Rafah

If in parts of northern Gaza, there are only a few hundred meters separating IDF frontal positions from the Palestinian population, the IDF portion of Rafah currently cuts deep into the center of the Strip.

This was the first trip by this reporter back to Gaza since the ceasefire kicked in, and the sense among IDF personnel was that, aside from this unexpected battle with Hamas forces caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, the ceasefire is holding.

They are, of course, ready to return to going on the offensive if necessary, but generally they are in a holding pattern.

Despite the new general calm arising from the ceasefire, IDF sources are nowhere near feeling even a theoretical impact of incoming international peacekeepers.

They have not trained for how to deal with these peacekeepers, nor had any coordination conversations, suggesting that the late 2025 or very early 2026 deployment of the new hoped-for International Stabilization Force (ISF) may be overly optimistic.

But after the Post has visited Gaza so many times and seen so many U-turns on policy and strategy, it has also become clear that the commanders in the field know best how to defeat the enemy in front of them, but are often not in the conversation about the future strategic direction of the Strip.

Ultimately, this visit to Gaza showed the Post how surprised all parties involved were by this unexpected battle, and how close that curveball came to breaking the truce, but that for now, the chiefs on all sides seem to have backed off the issue, allowing it to play out on the ground however it will play out.