INTO THE FOG: What I Saw In Gaza

Hamas' Greatest Weapon

“There is no clarity in war. Only fog and confusion” — Ernest Hemingway

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I slowly span the dustbowl of grey destruction that is Northern Gaza. Desolation utter and complete. The town of Beit Hanoun lies a crumpled skeleton before me. Ash and sand veil the sky, hiding the total lifelessness from the glaring sun. Lifelessness interrupted only by a single stray mutt sniffing through the badlands between the Israel Defence Forces outpost I’m stood on and the razed camp of Jabaliya ahead. It’s found something in the ruin. Is that a rat?

No.

It’s a leg. A human leg.

Still in its boot.

“We believe there are still Hamas in the tunnels between here and the Yellow Line,” the IDF commander tells me, “they probably don’t know about the ceasefire.”

Nowhere is totally safe for the IDF, despite their military superiority. Even here. Even now, some weeks after President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan was signed in Egypt. As well as the threat of errant terrorists beneath them, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) may still be lying under rocks at our feet. Two IDF soldiers have been killed since the October 10th treaty. And many more Hamas militants.

Jabaliya, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abed Hajjar)

Until this year I had had no experience in the field of war. War was an abstraction. Horrifying of course, and far-off. But, dare I say, romantic. A romance whipped up reading Churchill’s war memoirs and glossed by the latest Hollywood film. In all, my impression of war was a simplicity induced both by naïveté and a distance from the conflict zone, physical and in imagination.

That changed in the 12 Day War in June. Quite by coincidence I was in Tel Aviv when the sirens erupted and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intentions on Iran via a streamed broadcast on my X feed as I sat, sleepy, in a hotel mamad - a bomb shelter.

The following two weeks, along with the rest of Tel Aviv, I stood in the firing line of Iranian missiles. Cortisol and adrenalin running wild through my veins. The only thing that mattered to me were details of the belligerents’ munitions, weaponry, tactics, strategy; their military capabilities and operations. The salience of which were all the more vindicated with news of the U.S. military’s Operation Midnight Hammer and the successful B-2 mission to drop the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound precision-guided “bunker buster” bomb on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Fordow.

But perhaps most intellectually sobering of all — watching a Kheibar Shekan ballistic missile with a half-tonne warhead hurtle towards me at Mach 7 speed, missing our building, but killing nine of our neighbours down the road.

All of one’s immediate priorities are reduced to the domain of the practical. Of survival. Ernest Hemingway wrote war was “fog and confusion”, but it is first and foremost existential. And that factor brings razor focus and sharp priorities.

So in Gaza now, I arrive with some humility.

The panoramic rubble that sweeps around me begs a question — why? Why is it that every inch from here to Gaza City has been flattened? The truth was lost in the fog of war. And the fog of war has been exploited by the enemies of the truth.

Those enemies include once trusted media institutions like the BBC who were exposed by the Michael Prescott memo and The Telegraph for acting as the de facto propaganda arm of Hamas.

Those enemies include corrupt supra-national organisations like the UN, which have been infiltrated at the upper echelons by Hamas apologists, and at the ground level by Hamas themselves.

Those enemies include activists, journalists, politicians alike with little interest for military operations in the combat zone. Instead they have concocted the most base of motivations for Israel. Accusations of “ethnic cleansing”. Accusations of “genocide”. These were hurled at Israel before they’d even responded to the pogrom on October 7th, 2023.

But it has also been a consequence of Israel’s failure in the “propaganda war”. Israel’s failure to explain their operations and military manoeuvres to the wider world. Even when that world was not listening. A failure which Prime Minister Netanyahu himself concedes.

I myself have found it difficult to glean such information throughout the last two years. It is what it I have come here to understand.

And so, in my few hours into the Gaza Strip, this is what I learnt…