Reporter's Notebook: Embedded with the IDF deep inside Hamas tunnels under UNRWA HQ

There was not a lot of dialogue with the Israeli Defense Forces contacts before this embed happened. After four months of this war, they have the drill down to a system and the IDF had something they wanted to show the outside world.

We loaded up onto Humvees. A soldier stood in the front seat, one hand on the roll bar, the other on an automatic weapon mounted to the hood. At my left elbow was an Israeli version of a shoulder-mounted rocket as well as a spare rifle.

For the first 10 minutes of the trip, we were still in Israel. We traveled on the pavement. The closer we got to the Gaza Strip, the road got rougher where the sides had been broken up by heavy armored vehicles. Camps began to appear where soldiers waited outside the fence for their orders to return to combat.

Once we passed the fence into Gaza, the landscape showed only destruction. I didn’t see a building or structure that wasn’t damaged. Most were flattened.

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The drivers went breakneck over the twisted and potholed sand roads until we arrived at the camp for the 401st armored division in the Gaza Strip. Soldiers waited on plastic chairs between their vehicles. A few had wandered to the beach to take pictures. Some did maintenance on the big Merkava tanks.

We did not stay long. We transferred into an Israeli Namer, armored personnel carrier, for the trip to the Shati refugee camp, just north of the population center of Gaza City. Reports of Hamas fighters regrouping in Gaza City created a reasonable risk of an ambush, despite Israel’s firm control of the area.

When we climbed out of the armored vehicle at Shati, I could see 360 degrees of destruction. Piles of dirt and