RAFAH, Gaza – In a first since the start of the Gaza war, Hamas may have pre-evacuated many of the Palestinian civilians in Rafah before the IDF fully invaded, IDF Col. and Nahal Brigade Commander Yair Zuckerman told The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Rafah on Wednesday.
Zuckerman said that he believed Hamas itself pressed for an earlier and quicker evacuation to gain more time to set more booby traps for the IDF once it entered the area.
Zuckerman’s analytical point, if true, would mark a stunning turn of events.
In all prior battles with Hamas – whether in northern Gaza, central Gaza, or Khan Yunis – the Gazan terror group pushed to prevent Palestinian civilians from following evacuation orders.
There were even numerous documented cases in which civilians who were able to speak to the IDF or terrorists who were later captured admitted that large groups of civilians had been held as human shields.
In fact, a cornerstone of Hamas’s strategy was to keep as many civilians as possible nearby to deter Israel from attacking or to increase the likelihood of their own people dying in the crossfire in order to later blame Israel on the world stage.
Against all logic
As such, the idea that Hamas would “assist” the IDF by helping evacuate the 1.4 million civilians who were in Rafah goes against everything that has been known about Hamas’s strategy from October 2023 until last month.
It would seem even stranger in Rafah because the US managed to delay the IDF’s invasion of the city for four months, in no small part based on the idea that an invasion would lead to the largest killing of civilians since the start of the war due to the high volume of people there.
Zuckerman defended his analysis, noting that Hamas’s booby-trapping of Rafah was far more extensive than anywhere else in the Gaza Strip. He said he thought it was unlikely that Hamas would have been able to integrate the number of booby traps into civilians’ homes that the IDF encountered once it invaded if the civilians were still living there.
Supporting Zuckerman’s argument, the international community was surprised at the speed with which the vast majority of the civilians evacuated Rafah, as was the IDF.
The US predicted that evacuating 1.4 million people would take four months, while the IDF expected it to take four weeks. Ultimately, it took only two weeks.
Zuckerman’s theory could help explain why the evacuation went faster than the IDF expected.
And if Hamas believed, based on the many other experiences it had with evacuation successes, that an evacuation was inevitable anyway, at least using the extra time to set up a much larger apparatus of booby traps would be some achievement.
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