Israel’s military said Wednesday it seized control of a strategic corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt to cut off smuggling tunnels as it tries to destroy the militant Hamas group in a war now in its eighth month.

The capture of the Philadelphi Corridor could complicate Israel’s relations with Egypt, which has complained about Israel’s advance toward its border. Israel says the corridor is awash in tunnels that have funneled weapons and other goods for Hamas — despite a yearslong blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.

Israel also deepened its incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands have been seeking shelter from fighting, and where intensifying violence in recent days has killed dozens of Palestinians. The military said that a fifth brigade — up to several thousand soldiers — joined troops operating in the city on Tuesday.

Egypt says any increase in troops in the strategic border area would violate the countries’ 1979 peace accord. It already has complained about Israel taking over the Rafah border crossing, the only crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

“The Philadelphi Corridor served as the oxygen line of Hamas through which Hamas carried out weapons smuggling into Gaza on a regular basis,” said Israel's military chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

An Israeli military official said Israel had notified Egypt of the takeover. Some 20 tunnels, including some previously unknown to Israel, were found, as well as 82 access points to the tunnels, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations. It was not clear if the tunnels were currently in use.

The corridor is part of a larger demilitarized zone along the entire Israel-Egypt border. Under the peace accord, each side is allowed to deploy only a small number of troops or border guards in the zone, though those numbers can be modified by mutual agreement. At the time of the accord, Israeli troops controlled Gaza, until Israel withdrew its forces and settlers in 2005.

Egypt's state-run Al-Qahera News TV reported there were “no communications with the Israeli side” on the allegations of finding tunnels on the border. Egypt has repeatedly expressed concerns that the Israeli offensive could push Palestinians across the border — a scenario Egypt says is unacceptable.

The narrow corridor — about 100 meters (yards) wide in parts — runs the 14-kilometer (8.6-mile) length of the Gaza side of the border with Egypt and includes the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

Hamas has had free rein of the border since its 2007 takeover of Gaza.

Smuggling tunnels were dug under the Gaza-Egypt border to get around the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed after Hamas took over. Some of the tunnels were large enough for vehicles. Hamas brought in weapons and supplies, and Gaza residents smuggled in commercial goods, from livestock to construction materials.

That changed over the past decade, as Egypt battled Islamic militants in Sinai. The Egyptian military cracked down on the tunnels and destroyed hundreds of them.

The Israeli military official said Israel has also taken “tactical control” of Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood on Rafah's northwest edge. But he said the incursion into the city remains a “limited scope and scale operation.”

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said seizure of the Philadelphi Corridor would be consistent with the “limited” ground operation Israeli officials briefed President Joe Biden’s team on for the city of Rafah.

“When they briefed us on their plans for Rafah it did include moving along that corridor and out of the city proper to put pressure on Hamas in the city,” Kirby told reporters Wednesday.

Meanwhile, deadly violence continued. The Gaza Health Ministry said an apparent Israeli strike killed two ambulance crew members on their way to evacuate casualties in Tel al-Sultan.

Earlier Wednesday, a top Israeli official said the war was likely to last through the end of the year — a grim prediction for a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, deepened Israel’s global isolation and brought the region to the brink of a wider conflagration.

Israel's national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told Kan public radio he was “expecting another seven months of fighting” to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group.

The army has said from the start the “war will be long,” he said. “They have designated 2024 as a year of war.”

Hanegbi’s remarks raise questions about the future of Gaza and what role Israel will play in it. The United States, Israel's top ally, has demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decide on a postwar vision for the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu's defense minister and a top governing partner have warned he must take steps to ensure that Israel isn’t bogged down in Gaza indefinitely.

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The war has already devastated Gaza’s urban landscape, displaced most of its population and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe and widespread hunger. It has opened Israel up to international legal scrutiny, with world courts faulting it over its wartime conduct, sparked disagreements with the White House, and on Tuesday prompted three European nations to formally recognize a Palestinian state.

Israel says it must dismantle Hamas' last remaining battalions in Rafah and will seek indefinite security control over the Gaza Strip, even after the war ends. Still, it has yet to achieve its main goals of dismantling Hamas and returning scores of hostages captured in Hamas' Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.

Beyond Rafah, Israeli forces were still battling militants in parts of Gaza the military said it wrested control of months ago — potential signs of a low-level insurgency that could keep Israeli troops engaged in the territory.

The fighting in Rafah has displaced 1 million people, the United Nations says, most of whom were already displaced from other parts of Gaza.

Residents said fighting was underway in the city center and on the outskirts of Tel al-Sultan, the same neighborhood where an Israeli strike over the weekend ignited a fire that swept through an encampment for displaced people, killing dozens. Israel said it was investigating and the blaze may have been caused by a secondary explosion.

A floating pier built by the U.S. to surge aid into the territory was damaged in bad weather, another setback to efforts to bring food to starving Palestinians. Gaza's land crossings are now entirely controlled by Israel.

The U.S. and other allies have warned against a full-fledged offensive in Rafah, with the Biden administration saying this would cross a “red line” and refusing to provide offensive arms for such an undertaking. But so far, it hasn't tried to stop Israel's advances.

Last week, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its Rafah offensive as part of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel denies.

The war began when militants burst into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking around 250 hostages. More than 100 were released during a November cease-fire in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Israel’s offensive in response to the attack has killed at least 36,096 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians. Israel says it has killed 15,000 militants.

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Egyptian casualty along Gaza border puts strain on the landmark Israel-Egypt peace accord

Egyptian trucks carrying humanitarian aid bound for the Gaza Strip queue outside the Rafah border crossing on the Egyptian side.

It was another close call. When a clash between Egyptian and Israeli soldiers near Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip left one Egyptian dead, it raised the specter — yet again — of a spark that would set off a conflagration across the Middle East.

Both countries moved swiftly to contain the fallout, a sign of the durability of their decades-long diplomatic ties. Egypt’s military spokesman talked about a “shooting incident” but did not mention Israel, while the Israeli military said “dialog was taking place with the Egyptian side.”

But Monday’s skirmish was the latest in a string of events underscoring the region’s volatility since Oct. 7, and the risk that the Israel-Hamas war will rattle long-standing peace agreements — nurtured by Washington for decades — between Israel and its neighbors.

Relations between Egypt and Israel have been strained for months, with Cairo intent on stopping any Israeli effort to drive Gaza residents onto Egyptian territory.

Tensions only worsened after Israel pushed into the south Gazan city of Rafah this month — where an estimated 1.4 million of Gaza’s residents had taken refuge — and seized the Palestinian side of the crossing and the Philadelphi Corridor, an almost 9-mile-long and 300-foot-wide path along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

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In response, Egypt shut down humanitarian deliveries via Rafah, insisting administration of the crossing return to Palestinian control and that Israel was violating decades-old security arrangements that limited the number of soldiers and equipment on either side of the border.

But Monday’s shooting, the first deadly clash between Egyptian and Israeli forces since the war began, illustrates the risks of spillover in the fighting as Israel presses its offensive into Rafah and operates in close proximity to Egyptian units, not to mention Egyptian civilians living close to the border.

“This will happen again,” said Samir Ragheb, an Egyptian analyst and chairman of the Cairo-based Arab Foundation for Development and Strategic Studies.

“Committees [are] investigating the incident and [there’s] dialogue between the two sides,” he said. “All that’s fine. But there’s no guarantee for what comes later. ... This is dealing with the symptom not the disease: which is that Israel is in Rafah and on the border where it shouldn’t be.”

Israel says the crossing and the corridor must remain in its hands if it is to choke off arms supplies to Hamas through the Sinai, whether through the crossing or the cross-border tunnel network Hamas operates.

On Tuesday, in response to questions about tanks appearing on the streets of Rafah for the first time in the war, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said troops had “detected tunnels running along the Philadelphi Corridor ... going to Sinai.”

Egyptian officials have repeatedly dismissed Israeli accusations of allowing smuggling as “groundless,” adding that it has destroyed thousands of tunnels, created a buffer zone and built a barrier to prevent weapons transfers.

Details of exactly how the clash occurred remain murky. Initial Israeli reports said the Egyptian side was the first to open fire, while Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News said preliminary investigations indicated a skirmish had started between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, with shots fired in multiple directions. That led an Egyptian security team member to take protective measures and “deal with the source of fire,” the news agency said.

“This is what Egypt has warned against for months,” an unnamed Egyptian security official told Al Qahera on Monday. “The Israeli attack on the Philadelphi Corridor creates field and psychological conditions that are difficult to control and liable to escalate.”

The killing of the soldier has ratcheted up anti-Israel sentiment in a country that has never managed more than a so-called cold peace with its neighbor, despite being the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

“There are 115 million Egyptians who are not happy with what’s happening in Gaza,” Ragheb said. “They’re watching it every day on television screens. The Egyptian soldier stationed at the border is seeing massacres in real time before his very eyes. So this will be a provocation.”

Some of that anger could be seen on Tuesday, when dozens gathered in the central Egyptian village of Agameyin for the burial of the slain soldier, 22-year-old Abdullah Ramadan. Thousands left comments on his Facebook page, calling him a martyr and a hero, and excoriating the government for tamping down the matter.

Though the Egyptian government says it aims to preserve the peace treaty, popular rage against Israel may force it into taking measures it would rather not take.

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“The problem for Egypt is that public opinion is already at a boiling point because of what’s happening in Gaza,” said Mouin Rabbani, an analyst and nonresident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. “If you now add dead Egyptians to the mix, that makes it all the more combustible. Should government officials get to a point where they have to do something to defuse discontent, then they may feel Israel’s conduct has created such public pressure on them that they have no choice but to do something more significant.”

A wider Israeli assault on Rafah could very well be that tipping point. On Sunday, hours before the shooting, Israeli warplanes attacked what they said were Hamas high-level targets in Rafah, killing 45 people in the process, Palestinian authorities say, and spurring a tsunami of international anger.

The wider destruction, meanwhile, has reached unprecedented proportions, aid groups say, with more than 36,000 people killed in Gaza, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, including many women and children. In the three weeks since Israel began what it called a limited operation in Rafah, around 1 million people have had to flee, many of them displaced before by the violence, according to the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

“This happened with nowhere safe to go and amidst bombardments, lack of food and water, piles of waste and unsuitable living conditions,” UNRWA said on X on Monday. “Day after day, providing assistance and protection becomes nearly impossible.”

The war was sparked after Hamas operatives killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, and saw 250 others taken hostage. About 100 hostages remain in Gaza, along with the bodies of more than 30 others.

Few believe the Israel-Egypt peace treaty — a mainstay of Egypt’s foreign policy that brings in roughly $1.3 billion every year in military assistance from the U.S. — is at serious risk. But there’s little doubt the situation is affecting coordination between the two nations, said Rami Dajani, project director of Israel and Palestine with the International Crisis Group.

“The cumulative effects of these events impact how these agreements are functioning and the practical, real-life channels of communication on intelligence and security,” he said.

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It also raises questions about how both sides will manage the border area in the future.

“For both sides, it’s not a question of walking away from the treaty,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Arab-Israeli negotiator.

But with Israel seeking greater control over Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor while Egypt insists it won’t reopen the crossing without Palestinians in control, matters are likely to be fraught for a long time.

Said Miller: “All of this poses an enormous amount of problems for the proverbial day after.”

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What is happening in Rafah? The key developments as Israel's military offensive continues.

After the ICJ calls for Israel to halt its Rafah offensive, Yahoo News breaks down what is happening in Gaza's southernmost city.

 

Palestinians search for food among burnt debris in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on an area designated for displaced people in Rafah. 

The southern Gaza city of Rafah has been under siege since Israel forces began what it described as “targeted” ground operations on 6 May.

Once a safe zone for Gazans fleeing conflict in other areas of the enclave, Rafah's expanded population of 1.5 million people (of whom around 1.25 million people were displaced from elsewhere in Gaza) has dwindled to 500,000 – with one million having fled bombardment in the past three weeks.

Israel says Hamas' remaining battalions are in Rafah, and its May offensive in the city has seen Israel gain control of 75% of the zone along the Gaza-Egypt border, a senior Israeli official told the BBC.

Israeli bombings of tented encampments in recent days have resulted in the deaths of at least 65 displaced people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, while Israel has also seized control of (and closed) the vital Rafah crossing, through which much-needed aid was previously delivered to Gaza.

Charities have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding, with food, medicine and water now in desperately short supply.

The last hospital in Rafah is also under threat, with aid workers warning that a continuing Israeli incursion would likely see healthcare in the city grind to a total halt.

"If the incursion would continue, we would lose the last hospital in Rafah," Richard Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative for Gaza and the West Bank, told Reuters.

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Where is Rafah?

Rafah is the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, and the final refuge for many Palestinians who have been displaced multiple times during Israel's bombardment.

Prior to Israel's current offensive in the city, more than 1.3 million people were taking refuge in Rafah, having been displaced from other areas of Gaza.

It became one of the most densely populated places in the world as more Gazans were forced there, with Medical Aid for Palestinians at one point warning that overcrowding had "forced many displaced people to sleep on the streets, in the grounds of hospitals, or in makeshift tents in schools". Of the three hospitals in Rafah, just one remains "barely functional", the WHO said this week.

Prior to the expected ground invasion, Rafah was still subject to airstrikes by the Israel Defense Force, despite the area being designated by Israel as a "safe zone" for people to flee to while northern Gaza was bombarded.

Rafah is a particularly important location given its proximity to the Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt, through which humanitarian aid has previously been delivered.

Timeline of recent events in Rafah

6 May 2024

After weeks of speculation about increased military action in Rafah, Israel drops leaflets in the city ordering people to evacuate.

7 May 2024

Israel seizes control of the Gazan side of the Rafah border crossing, telling civilians in eastern Rafah to evacuate. Israeli airstrikes hit the city, killing at least 25 people.

Aid through the vital crossing is halted – both Israel and Egypt blame one another for the crossing being closed.

8 May 2024

US president Joe Biden urges Israel against the military action, and says the US will not supply weapons that could be used in a Rafah offensive. Israeli airstrikes in Rafah kill at least 12 people, according to data from OCHA ReliefWeb.

9 May 2024

Hamas fires at IDF troops as they continue raids in the city. Israeli airstrikes continue, killing at least eight people in Rafah.

Amnesty International warns that thousands of people in Rafah will be killed if ground operations continue. “Nowhere in Gaza can currently provide aid at a scale that will ensure people’s survival,” it told Al Jazeera. “If the planned ground operation is not stopped, thousands more civilians will be killed.”

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10 May 2024

UN agencies warn that aid in Gaza is rapidly dwindling following the closure of the Rafah Crossing. The number of people who have fled Rafah now sits at 280,000, according to a UN tally, with half of those people fleeing in the past day.

“For five days, no fuel and virtually no humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip, and we are scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Unicef senior emergency coordinator in the Gaza strip, Hamish Young, told The Guardian.

11 May 2024

The IDF steps up its operation in Rafah. A UN official in western Rafah tells the BBC: "We've had a significant increase in bombardment and it's definitely advancing towards us."

Israel says Hamas has fired rockets at the Rafah crossing and also reports face-to-face battles with Hamas in areas of the city.

13 May 2024

Gaza authorities warn the health system is at risk of imminent collapse, as a result of the limited aid available following the closing of the Rafah crossing.

More than 900 parents of Israeli soldiers sign a letter calling for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to call off the "reckless" Rafah offensive, which they said was a "deadly trap" for their children.

14 May 2024

Medicins Sans Fronteirs (MSF) says it left Rafah Indonesian field hospital on Sunday. A UN worker describes the inland of the city as a "ghost town" as people continue to flee. Officials estimate that up to 500,000 people have now evacuated from the city.

Israeli tanks continue further into eastern Rafah, according to local reports.

15 May 2024

Israeli tanks push into built-up areas of Rafah. The UN estimates 600,000 people have now fled the city.

Netanyahu defends Israel's Rafah operation, saying: "The humanitarian catastrophe that has been spoken of has not been realised, nor will it."

Tent cities spring up outside of Rafah, as displaced people are forced to move once again to areas outside of the city.

17 May 2024

Israel's counsel tells the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is hearing South Africa's case to force Israel to stop the Rafah offensive: "Only by bringing down Hamas's military stronghold in Rafah will Palestinians be liberated from the clenched grip of the murderous terrorist regime and the road to peace and prosperity may finally be paved."

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18 May 2024

At least 800,000 people have now fled Rafah, according to UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini.

Israel says it has recovered the bodies of hostages Ron Binyamin, Shani Louk, Itzhak Gelerenter and Amit Buskila, who were killed by Hamas in the 7 October attacks. Israel says intelligence suggests other hostages are being held in Rafah.

The IDF says it is increasing humanitarian aid in Gaza. The Rafah crossing remains closed.

21 May 2024

At least five people are killed in airstrikes in Rafah, including three children, Reuters reports.

UNRWA suspends food distribution in Rafah due to lack of supplies.

24 May 2024

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders Israel to stop its military offensive in Rafah. However the order is not enforceable.

26 May 2024

An Israeli airstrike on displaced people in tents kills at least 45 people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The situation is later described by UNRWA as "hell on earth".

Israel's military said its attack was on a “compound of the terrorist organisation Hamas in Rafah, where key terrorists of the organisation were staying”.

In the aftermath of the bombing, images show people combing through the charred remains of the camp, searching for the bodies of family members and friends.

27 May

Netanyahu says the tent bombing in Rafah was a "tragic mistake". Addressing parliament, he said Israel would be investigating.

28 May 2024

The Hamas-run health ministry says 21 more people have been killed in another airstrike on displaced people in tents, and a further 64 injured. The IDF says it did not strike the camp at Al-Mawasi,

Around one million people have now fled the city.

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