A Tour of Hell
With the Israeli Army in Gaza
The only way for Western journalists to access Gaza currently is through tours led by the Israeli military. Reporters encounter streams of refugees and rubble from the destruction, but to what extent does it really deepen their understanding of the war?
By Jonathan Stock
Gaza, on this particular morning, is still little more than a promise.
We won't just be seeing rubble, the buildings, the tanks as has thus far been the case, says the press spokeswoman.
No, today, for the first time, we'll be seeing people, real refugees, Palestinians.
"Exciting," says the spokeswoman.
Three television teams are waiting in the mud next to her, along with a reporter from the Guardian.
They have all put on their protective vests and are holding their helmets.
One of the journalists passes around sunblock.
It's hot in Gaza.
Good thing it rained, says one of the camera operators, noting that it helps keep dust out of the lenses.
The journalists are waiting on the outskirts of the Be'eri kibbutz, so close to the Gaza Strip that children here used to have nightmares of terrorists attacking them in their bedrooms.
Until October 7, when they actually did, slaughtering 108 people in the kibbutz, filming themselves as they did so.
They even tortured pets.
Be'eri has since become a base for the Israeli army.
The fighting is still ongoing in Gaza; no cease-fire has yet been agreed to.
A Small Radius
Not far away, soldiers are preparing for their next operation, pulling on their combat helmets and sunglasses, loading their weapons.
Some are laughing, likely from nervousness before the fighting begins.
Merkava tanks rumble past beneath the palm trees along with armored personnel carriers, swallowing up our words.
The ground is still wet from the rain, and it smells like diesel.
In the distance, crops are rotting in the fields.
An Israeli soldier leans out the window of his Unimog and yells: "Don't be like CNN please!"
The tour, as they call it here, is about to begin.
The tour is currently the only way to get into the Gaza Strip.
Only a handful of journalists are approved each day, if at all, and everyone who comes along must sign a 10-page document that releases the Israeli army from any responsibility.
It reads like a reconnaissance report ahead of a difficult operation.
During the tour, journalists are required to remain within a tight radius around the Israeli army, who also dictate the route that will be taken.
Every photo must be examined by Israeli censors and any interview can be prohibited.
Those are the rules.
Doron Spielman arrives and begins shaking hands.
He is wearing an assault rifle around his neck and has a can of Pepsi in his hand.
Spielman is the press spokesman who will be coming along on the tour.
He begins explaining what the group could encounter today: bombs, snipers, rockets, booby traps, gunfire.
The journalists listen quietly.
Three Israeli soldiers will be killed on this day, and two more injured.
Spielman later says that his entire family plays a musical instrument, but his métier just happens to be words.
He also says that he believes the Ark of the Covenant from the time of Moses will still be found.
Spielman, from Detroit, speaks slowly and clearly, pausing at all the right moments.
Television broadcasters love his English.
He says that during the tour in the Gaza Strip, everyone will have to follow the instructions of a soldier who has received a medal for courage.
The soldier, says Spielman, overpowered a terrorist with his bare hands.
"We have Rambo," he says in summary.
The soldier is from the Jerusalem Brigade, which fought in Jerusalem when Israel captured control of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
He's now fighting in Gaza.
Meeting Rambo
The man they call Rambo is named Nitai Okashi.
He is a captain, a small, friendly man who is quick with a smile.
He doesn't talk much, and his voice is quiet, but when he does say something, his men spring into action.
How was he able to eliminate the terrorist with his bare hands, the journalists want to know?
Those are just stories, Okashi says modestly, adding that he loves his country.
"In my heart," he says, "I'm not that brave."
The last tours were taken into Gaza in armored vehicles, but now, everyone is sitting in the beds of Humvees, protected from the outside world only by a mosquito net.
The cameras are clicking as five vehicles move out, each armed with a machine gun affixed to the bed.
Captain Okashi rides in the front.
"I can't guarantee that nothing will happen," he said before we boarded the vehicles.
Up ahead, says one of the photographers, is the border fence to the Gaza Strip – where the terrorists streamed into Israel on the morning of October 7.
Okashi now drives into Gaza through that the same blown-up fence.
The border fence to the Gaza Strip Foto: Ziv Koren / DER SPIEGELTel Aviv
"I grew up in Wedding," says Arye Shalicar, referring to the district of Berlin.
"You always need a quick answer there."
Like Spielman, Shalicar is an army press spokesman.
He is primarily responsible for German journalists and politicians.
He has led German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock around Israel and is on television almost daily.
This morning, he had a meeting with the Air Force over coffee in Tel Aviv, and now he is heading to the site of a massacre, a place where terrorists cut off the heads of children.
He doesn't do much thinking on the two-hour drive to the south.
He just keeps talking and always has something to say, no matter what the topic.
"Arye," his assistant sometimes admonishes from the backseat, "you have to be careful."
Hardly ever has a war been as closely examined by the media as this one, hardly ever a conflict with such divergent interpretations, where opinions are so entrenched and uncompromising.
Shalicar is a combatant in this war over perception and meaning.
It is his job to tell the story over and over again that justifies the Israeli army's offensive in Gaza and to show the destruction wrought by Hamas in Israel.
It is a story illustrated by bodies in refrigerated containers and by horrific video clips showing an old woman in a wheelchair being shot, her whimpering clearly audible; a man being beat to death with a garden hoe; piles of children's bodies.
There is the folder full of abhorrent pictures of people burned to a crisp.
Today, Shalicar has Uwe Becker along with him, the anti-Semitism commissioner for the German state of Hesse and former mayor of Frankfurt.
"Uwe," says Shalicar, "a lovely man."
Becker, who enjoys his walks along the banks of the Main River, is on his way to Kfar Asa today, one of the kibbutzim attacked by the terrorists.
Becker says he is extremely unsettled by this conflict and also wants to visit places that are uncomfortable.
Major Arye Shalicar Foto: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGELThe car winds its way through the Tel Aviv traffic down into the Negev Desert.
Becker still needs a protective vest and a helmet.
Kfar Asa can be seen from Gaza and there is still some gunfire in the area.
Shalicar says that he was recently standing at the border when a journalist came up to him and said the Israelis should be happy that they still have homes, a luxury that those in Gaza don't have.
"We don't build any tunnels," Shalicar responded.
Ultimately, he says, people just don't know any more who is Ernie and who is Bert.
Who is who, and who started it all, what is going on: Nobody understands it anymore.
This is how he summarizes the Middle East conflict.
For him, though, it's clear.
Raised in Berlin
His parents used to live in Iran but moved to Germany to escape the anti-Semitism back home.
He grew up as a Jew in Wedding in Berlin.
All he wanted to do was play soccer.
But as the only Jew on his street, he was hated.
So he fled the anti-Semitism to Israel.
And now they're being attacked again.
"What are we supposed to do?" he asks.
The sirens from Ashkelon can be heard inside the car – a rocket alarm somewhere.
They have learned from history, he says, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
That's the mentality around here, he says.
They went and got Adolf Eichmann back then, the Nazi responsible for planning the murder of 6 million Jews, he says, and they will also bring the Hamas leader to justice.
Columns of smoke can be seen rising up in the distance.
"There's a lot going on ahead of us," says Shalicar.
The problem, says Shalicar, is that people forget.
To justify what's going on in Gaza, people like Shalicar have to keep the images alive.
The efforts undertaken to do so can sometimes seem almost desperate – when yet another tour to yet another kibbutz is offered.
The parachute journalists have already left.
Few are still interested in pictures from the massacre.
A stop is made at an army base near the kibbutz.
The Armenian ambassador is there, along with a bus full of orthodox Jews.
A last pitstop before heading to the site of the massacre.
The ambassador pulls out a protective vest for the German reading "Israeli Foreign Ministry."
He asks if it’s a problem for Becker.
"No problem," Becker responds.
He carefully dons the helmet and pulls on the heavy vest.
Kfar Asa is still in a military exclusion zone due to its proximity to the Gaza Strip.
Normally, in his main job as state secretary for federal and European issues, Becker deals with things like air traffic problems and local political questions.
But suddenly, he finds himself in a war zone.
Destruction in the Kfar Asa kibbutz Foto: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGEL"That Was Close"
A politician from the British House of Lords also pulls on a protective vest and takes a couple of selfies with his companions.
His name is David Wolfson, the Baron of Tredegar.
Last year, after Boris Johnson's Partygate scandal, he resigned from his position as undersecretary of state for justice.
He's now here to take a closer look at the destroyed kibbutz.
But before the tour starts, he wants to take a couple of photos with Uwe Becker, who doesn't seem to know quite what is going on.
The baron, the Armenian ambassador, the orthodox Jews and Uwe Becker then all drive together past blocks of concrete and flowering hibiscus before a yellow gate opens as they approach the destruction.
Shalicar stops at a parking lot and walks through the gate into the burned-out ruins.
He turns around.
"What do you need?" he asks Becker.
The images from Israel and Gaza are also decisive for this war.
The footage broadcast by television news channels influences decisions about aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, shipments of medical supplies from Germany and votes in the United Nations Security Council.
Images of dying newborns from the Shifa Hospital in Gaza are set against images of the burned bodies of children from the kibbutz.
Pictures of babies against pictures of babies.
The Jerusalem Brigade in Gaza City Foto: Ziv Koren / DER SPIEGELThe result is fragmented realities, rival narratives.
People in the same room see different versions of the same war.
Everyone tries to focus attention on their own suffering to generate international sympathy and support.
In Palestinian schoolbooks, the 1972 attack on the Israelis at the Munich Olympics is played down and terrorists are portrayed as heroes.
In Israeli schoolbooks, the Nakba – the displacement of 700,000 Arab Palestinians in 1948 – is not even mentioned.
Only very few are prepared to see things through the lens of the other.
And every distortion, every mistake is immediately magnified on a global scale.
But Israel finds itself facing a dilemma.
The country's war cabinet has said the aim is to destroy Hamas.
But the price for doing so keeps growing – with every civilian killed, with every child who dies.
The Israeli army claims to adhere to the rules of war.
And Israel has a right to defend itself for as long as rockets continue to be fired into the country from Gaza, for as long as Hamas and Islamic Jihad don't release all of the hostages they are holding.
But international humanitarian law also requires that the number of casualties is proportionate to the military gain.
Harm to civilians must be kept to a minimum.
But what, exactly, does that mean: to a minimum?
Northern Gaza Strip
A black balloon, full of surveillance instruments, is hovering in the sky above Gaza.
But that is the only visible sign of Israel.
Dust patters down on the journalists as they try to keep their heads down.
Dogs can be seen along the road, but no people.
The unit from the Jerusalem Brigade heads through the second border fence as well.
For a long time, this border was thought to be one of the best-secured frontiers in the world, a barrier worth billions of dollars.
Today, it is little more than a hole in a fence.
Nobody says anything as the column crosses into the Gaza Strip.
Here, in the eastern part of Gaza, all is quiet.
Even the dogs.
You hear no birds, no yelling.
The vehicles head through a territory that many people compare to a prison – the Gaza Strip is half as big as the German city of Hamburg, but it is home to 2.3 million people, almost half of them children.
More than three-quarters of Gaza Strip residents have been displaced.
From the Humvee, it is only possible to see sand, debris, a dried-out riverbed and vehicle tracks.
"They make their own roads here," says one of the military handlers accompanying the journalists.
The passengers feel wind in their faces.
The reporter from Sky News tries to record a segment but gives up.
The convoy struggles up the sandy road, past an "IDF D9," the Monster, as they call it here – one of those grilled bulldozers that move out ahead of the advancing military because the armored blades can usually withstand the explosives.
Black Earth
A mound of gravel juts up in the distance, black earth.
No trees grow around here, just a bit of grass.
Otherwise, the ground is bare.
After crossing the Wadi Gaza, the convoy passes the shot-up buildings of Juhor ad-Dik before stopping in front of a destroyed yellow building.
Okashi's men jump out and secure the area, moving carefully.
Something explodes not far away.
The journalist from the Guardian says: "That was close."
The contents of the yellow building are piled up on the dusty ground out front.
Scrawny cats prowl past children's jackets and a pair of pink women's shoes.
A white dove is sitting improbably in front of the rubble.
Next to it is the business card of a bridal fashion shop and English homework for schoolchildren: "W as in watch."
The sentence "I want my scalps" has been scrawled in red on one of the walls inside.
The journalist from the Guardian points to some chickens running around and says: "Details."
The Jerusalem Brigade blowing up an air shaft Foto: Ziv Koren / DER SPIEGELBehind the house, in a former orange grove, Captain Okashi indicates a hole in the ground.
All of the journalists look down at it.
It is really little more than a small slit in the mud, perhaps large enough for a child to squeeze into.
"An airshaft for the Hamas tunnel system," Spielman says.
"The hostages are being held somewhere down there."
The journalists look around at the dead landscape.
Somewhere here below ground, 200 people are apparently being held, including a 10-month-old baby, a Holocaust survivor and a woman who was separated from her oxygen tank.
Spielman says that at the moment, there is nobody down below.
The soldiers lower explosives in a plastic bag and cover the hole with an old metal door as the journalists take cover behind a pile of dirt.
A short time later, a roar goes through the landscape, the door is blown into the air and a column of smoke pours out of the hole.
Over there, Spielman says pointing behind the black smoke, is Gaza City.
That's where the tour is heading next.
In the Kfar Asa Kibbutz
Shalicar and Becker are waiting in the parking lot to be shown the Kfar Asa kibbutz.
It is over 70 years old, founded by refugees.
The people who used to live here say they believed in peace, and that the place was 99 percent paradise.
But 1 percent hell.
Becker was already here once this year, in May, and he begins looking around for things he might recognize.
"The dogs and the children used to run around here," he says.
Now, it's the body collectors.
More than 50 people were murdered here, and more than a dozen taken hostage.
Back in May, Becker met the sister of a young man who was home with his parents in Kfar Asa on the morning of the attack.
First, the father was shot to death, says Becker.
The young man and his mother then fled into the bedroom, which also served as the safe room.
Then, his mother was shot, and he curled up in his mother's blood under the bed and played dead for seven hours.
"Complete Destruction"
Becker begins walking through the snarl of the roads.
Only occasionally can a flourishing garden be seen behind the wreckage of the homes.
"It's pretty shocking," says Shalicar as he walks around wearing the green uniform of the Israeli army.
"Look at this here, Uwe, complete destruction."
He walks past dog food, beneath metal roofing full of bullet holes, along bloody carpeting and shot-up walls.
Residents leaned mattresses against the broken windows in a desperate attempt to protect themselves.
"Then perhaps we should take a look inside the children's room," Shalicar suggests, "to get an impression."
Becker pulls out a selfie-stick. Artillery fire from the Israeli army thunders not far away.
The rocket siren suddenly sounds and a voice in Hebrew echoes over the sound system: "Red alert! Red alert!"
Becker pauses briefly, continues running, staggers slightly, but manages to keep the selfie-stick in his hand.
"Get away from the buildings, get down!" Shalicar shouts.
The anti-Semitism commissioner for the state of Hesse and Shalicar are now squatting on the lawn under a palm tree as the voice continues emitting from the speakers.
They duck down and quietly count to 15. Becker, wearing a blue shirt, looks up into the blue sky.
Then comes the all-clear.
Shalicar in the Kfar Asa kibbutz Foto: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGELMen from the group of Orthodox body collectors approach Becker, praying.
One says that they just scraped out the remains of a girl from the ceiling, after more than five weeks.
Becker nods.
In the back room, his team found the bodies of three adults and two children clutched together and burned to death on the floor of their safe room.
In another home, he found a child of around six years of age with a knife embedded in its head.
"What company are you from?" the man asks Becker.
"The Hessian state governor's office," says Becker.
The Baron of Tredegar is looking for his glasses, which he has lost.
Becker is carefully balancing over a garden gnome that is lying face down on the ground.
The Armenian ambassador shouts that they should perhaps hide behind a tree, noting that Gaza still has snipers who can hit targets from as far away as two kilometers.
Shalicar ignores his concerns.
You can see the gate from here through which the terrorists entered.
Over there, says Shalicar, straight ahead, is Gaza.
The neighbors.
In July 1942, during the Africa campaign, the Nazis formed a task force under the leadership of SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff.
After the conquest of Palestine, all the Jews living there were to be killed.
That was the Nazi plan: to kill all the Jews living in what is today's Israel.
A hadith is quoted in the founding charter of Hamas from 1988: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews and kill them.
Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees."
The ideas are similar: The Jews of Israel must die, there must not be a state of Israel.
The Death of Ideas
It is often said these days that ideas cannot be killed, not even those of Hamas.
It makes it sound as though there is no choice but to accept a situation in which terrorists rule a country.
But ideas can also die or become so weak that they no longer have any effect.
The Islamic State and the National Socialists ultimately had to be defeated militarily.
The city of Mosul, with its 1.5 million inhabitants, was not liberated through negotiations – it took airstrikes and artillery, and Mosul's old town remains largely destroyed today.
Very few people in Europe took to the streets back then to protest on behalf of the dead there, or the dead in Yemen.
Few other countries in the world must justify their very existence in the way that Israel does.
Even in the face of absolute terror perpetrated by its enemies.
During a press conference, a CNN presenter accused Israeli President Isaac Herzog of "collectively punishing" the Palestinians, while another journalist claimed that Israel is making the population accountable for the crimes of Hamas.
Herzog replied angrily: "With all due respect, if you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen, and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?
That's the situation."
There is something else that distinguishes this conflict.
People can flee from all the wars in the world.
But that is not true of the Gaza Strip.
There is nowhere for them to go.
Outside Gaza City
There's an uptick in the shelling.
Captain Okashi says it's tank fire and anti-tank guided missiles.
Along with heavy machine guns and artillery.
Okashi is asked how he can fight and protect the humanitarian corridor at the same time.
"Complicated," he replies.
The buildings of Gaza City become visible.
About 100 meters before reaching Salah al-Din Road, the convoy comes to a stop on a rise.
Down below, behind the mounds of earth pushed together by bulldozers, people emerge, real people, Palestinians.
A soldier rams a metal sign into the mud, a marker for the photographers.
The journalists aren't allowed to go beyond that point.
Nor are they allowed to film to the side, where a Shin Bet checkpoint is located, the Israeli secret service.
Salah al-Din, the main arterial in Gaza, connects the border crossings from Israel to Egypt, and is one of the world's oldest roads, used as far back as in the times of the pharaohs.
"Carry On, Don't Push!"
Today, it is a hellish landscape of tangled rubble, with the road churned into mud by the tanks.
Behind them, the multistory buildings have been bombed, with only skeletons remaining, the iron girders bent and huge concrete blocks broken out.
A speed limit sign stands uselessly among the rubble.
The announcement comes over the megaphone in Arabic.
"Carry on, don't push!
You, in the red T-shirt, to the side!"
Refugees are waiting down on the street.
For the first time in six weeks, the people of Gaza are visible to Western journalists.
There are a number of children among them, carrying small, pink backpacks, fathers carrying their sons.
Women clutch handbags, men plastic bags.
One man in a wheelchair is pushed laboriously across the rubble, a donkey standing behind him.
Toddlers run around in the dust until their parents pick them up and take them in their arms.
Gunfire can be heard in the distance, drones buzz overhead, a loud bang pierces the air every now and then.
In the back, a man holds up a white flag.
This corridor is open for a few hours a day.
"Can we talk to them?" an American journalist asks.
Spielman glances down at the refugees from the rise and thinks for a moment before shaking his head.
"Not now," he says.
Refugees in Gaza Strip Foto: Ziv Koren / DER SPIEGELLooking for Hostages among the Refugees
The masses down below are silent. No one is screaming, no one is shouting.
The people proceed slowly, their eyes fixed on the checkpoint.
When the unit arrives, they look up at the soldiers in surprise, then away again.
Refugees from Gaza will later report that they are afraid of being shot if they don't follow the rules, if they bend down or don't hold up their passports.
There are no cars to take them, fuel is too scarce.
The people flee along the 45-kilometer road on foot, some by donkey.
They report that there are burned-out cars along the road, in addition to corpses and fighting.
The road has turned into hell.
Up in the mud, Major Schraga has his rifle pointed toward the corridor.
He says he sometimes thinks about the children down below.
Above all, though, he says he's proud that the Israelis are securing an exit route for the refugees.
He looks around and says: "I know it looks like there has been a lot of fighting here.
And there has.
But the responsibility lies with Hamas."
Sometimes, an announcement in Hebrew is made: "If you can understand this, show yourself.
You will be safe.
Nobody will harm you."
The announcements are born out of the hope that some of the hostages might be mixed in among the refugees.
Thus far, though, says Schraga, they haven't found any.
Each of the soldiers has a different story to tell.
Assaf says that he has four children and isn't seeking revenge.
But because he wants peace, he must wage war.
Okashi says that the Israeli military is only doing what is necessary.
Referring to the refugees, the military photographer says: "The entire world is against us."
Her name is Eden, she says, like paradise.
She says she had never before been to Gaza, and her parents never visited either.
There is a "Little Gaza" in Israel, a place where they have built a model on a military base to practice house-to-house fighting.
But aside from that and the television images, most soldiers know nothing about the place.
For them, Gaza is a place where you die and where you kill, nothing more.
A threat, a complicated place for which there is no solution.
"How Bad Is Bad?"
Most of the people in the refugee corridor have never been to Israel either.
They don't know any Israelis, and they're afraid.
Two sides stand facing each other, unable to understand one another.
"How bad is bad?" Spielman asks.
Up on the rise, a soldier from a different unit comes over, Ariel, who says that he once lived in Gaza, in 1998, in a kibbutz south of here.
Back then, U.S. President Bill Clinton opened the international airport in Gaza.
The soldier say they used to grow tomatoes with help from the Arabs.
Just before the soldiers jump back onto the convoy, he says: "We will live here again."
There are parties for soldiers in Israel, with some walking around in a T-shirt that reads: "Beer in Gaza next year."
Ariel says that property prices will be high in five years.
After all, he notes, Gaza has a good beach.
Refugees hold up their identity documents Foto: Ziv Koren / DER SPIEGELIn the Kfar Asa Kibbutz
One of the body collectors says he remembers a house where they found a birthday cake on the table.
He says he looked around and saw photos hanging on the fridge: the children, the adults.
They were all dead.
"There are cribs, they had everything," says Shalicar's assistant.
"Do you want to keep going?" he asks, "Or are you tired?"
A few Israelis offer Uwe Becker sweets.
No thanks, says Becker.
The German broadcaster RTL calls and says they are standing in front of the other kibbutz where another massacre took place.
There were so many massacres that people sometimes get confused.
"Call the office," says Shalicar.
Becker has to return to Germany soon to read to a kindergarten in North Hesse and to visit a gymnastics association.
But he's still here.
Among the burned-out buildings, Becker talks about the videos from the security cameras.
Canadian journalists who have seen the footage say that two small boys can be seen fleeing with their father from the living room into the bunker in the courtyard of their home.
A terrorist throws a grenade in after them, and the father's body topples out lifelessly.
His body protected the children.
A gunman takes the boys back into the house, goes to the fridge, offers the children water and then grabs a Coke.
The older brother examines the younger one, who says the grenade has blinded him in one eye.
Uwe Becker in Kfar Asa Foto: PrivatBeheaded with a Hoe
Becker proceeds, holding his selfie-stick in his hand like a weapon, as if using it to defend himself from the horrors here.
At times, he goes into the destroyed buildings, climbing over the rubble.
In the end, he films a black wall and says: "That's the truth." Behind him, Shalicar is on the phone with another broadcaster.
"There's a bit of shelling here right now," he says.
When Becker later hands in the vest, the Armenian ambassador takes him aside and shows him the folder with the terrible pictures, as he describes them.
Women who have been raped, he says, burned and decapitated babies.
"Sandwich?" Shalicar asks.
Later in the car, he says Baerbock didn't see the whole video, but that she did watch the one in which a man is beheaded with a garden hoe.
The man struck many times, says Shalicar.
"Because the hoe was dull," says Becker.
Shalicar says Baerbock was nice.
But some also show emotions, says his assistant.
Sometimes, Shalicar says, he asks students in Germany what they imagine when they hear the word "Jew."
Four out of five answers have to do with dead Jews, he says, the fifth is about Israel, the wicked Jews.
He says he then asks if anyone knows a Jew personally and that the answer usually given by pupils is "no."
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