Israel’s months-long insistence on the need to clear out Rafah as the last military stronghold of Hamas has been vindicated as the IDF has penetrated deeper and deeper into the city over the last six weeks.

“The number of tunnels in this sector is the largest I have seen in the Strip,” Nahal Brigade commander Col. Yair Zuckerman told a contingent of Israeli journalists Tuesday who had been brought into the town on the Egyptian-Gazan border.

“There is almost no home without a tunnel,” he said, with passageways that connect whole neighborhoods both above ground and beneath.