A Hamas Police officer directs traffic in Gaza City, Jan. 28, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

The situation in Gaza has not changed, and a ceasefire is on paper only. There are daily attempts by small teams of Hamas and other organizations to attack Israeli positions monitoring the line or to infiltrate between them into the Israeli rear. The distance between the Yellow Line and the actual border is short, from two to five kilometers. In at least one case, an infiltrating Hamas team managed to almost reach the border.

The Israelis have continued to gradually push the Yellow Line forward, accumulating territory at the expense of Hamas in small slivers every few days. The areas chosen for advance are mostly connected to underground operations to find and destroy more of the Hamas tunnel infrastructure. The Israelis inform any people in the selected areas to move back, then pick up the yellow concrete blocks marking the line and replace them a few dozen to a few hundred meters ahead of their previous location. The Israeli assessment is that in the area controlled by their own forces (currently approaching 70% of the original territory of the Gaza Strip), they have destroyed approximately 85% of the tunnels. Almost every day, they report new sections of tunnels discovered or destroyed.

In addition to the daily skirmishes along the Yellow Line, Israel has slightly escalated its focused airstrikes on Hamas and other terrorist groups inside the area still held by Hamas. According to the reports of casualties inflicted by the Israelis, these strikes seem to be working.

Israel has two lists: one of commanders in the terrorist organizations (some senior, but mostly mid-level) and the other of participants in the October 7 Hamas offensive into Israel. Almost every day, there is a report of one or more terrorists on one or both of these lists being killed by an Israeli drone dropping a small guided bomb on him. Other targets include military infrastructure such as weapons stores or manufacturing sites. These occur more rarely and seem to be driven by the rate of discovery by Israeli intelligence.

The Israelis have also used liquid concrete to reach and neutralize tunnels on the Hamas side of the Yellow Line. They pour concrete into a tunnel they have discovered on their side of the Line that continues east into Hamas territory, and after a while, the concrete solidifies. An advantage to this approach is that the concrete flows not just into the main tunnel but also into all its subsidiary tunnels and vertical shafts (entrances and ventilation), shutting them down too. This operation was discovered by the Gazans when some concrete spilled out of vertical shafts onto the ground above.

One disadvantage of this method is that a huge amount of concrete is required to shut down kilometers’ worth of tunnels. A similar operation in 2019 against six short Hezbollah tunnels crossing into Israel needed weeks of preparation and took days of pouring, and it emptied the then-existing store of liquid concrete in Israel. The number of trucks needed to carry that much concrete is enormous, and the operation is both time- and labor-intensive. Another disadvantage is that the flow of concrete can be blocked by doors inside the tunnels, reducing the area it can affect.

The recent operation required 30,000 cubic meters of concrete to seal a tunnel about 16 kilometers long that had approximately 80 separate chambers along it (command posts, including that of the Hamas Rafah Brigade headquarters, storage sites, and living quarters). It was located underneath residential neighborhoods with homes, mosques, kindergartens, infirmaries, and an UNRWA school above it. From these were extended electricity lines, water pipes, and entry and ventilation shafts for the troops and equipment stationed in the tunnel.

Palestinian anti-Hamas groups continue to conduct occasional raids against Hamas personnel, leading to skirmishes with casualties on both sides. Hamas claims they receive support from the Israeli military.

Hamas continues to maintain firm control over the population in the area it holds and is recruiting new personnel to man its forces and conduct combat training. It is also attempting to salvage weapons and other military stores from underground storage sites bombed by the Israelis. Some of the infiltration attempts into the area controlled by the Israelis are aimed at reaching caches of weapons the Israelis have not yet found. Also, they are using cargo drones to try to import weapons from Egypt over the intervening area controlled by Israel (the area between Hamas territory and Egypt is only 4-6 kilometers wide). The Israelis have intercepted approximately 100 such flights, but more than 30 got through (and perhaps more the Israelis did not see).

One weapon Hamas is trying to stock up on is exploding drones, especially those controlled by optic fibers. Hamas used wireless-controlled exploding drones on October 7 as well as bomb-dropping models, but in the following weeks the Israelis managed to neutralize these as useful weapons by either shooting them down, cutting their communications, or locating and killing their operators. The fiber-optic models used in Ukraine and by Hezbollah are much harder to counter. During the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon, it was these weapons that inflicted most of the Israeli fatalities, though most of the Israeli wounded were caused by other means (rocket artillery and IEDs).

Hamas has declared that it is willing to relinquish official control over the administration of Gaza and hand it over to a “technocratic government” as stated in the ceasefire agreement of autumn 2025. However, as they have not given up their demands as to who should be included in this government and refuse to hand over their weapons, this government would be a mere façade behind which Hamas would continue to control Gaza and its population.

Hamas has provided partial numbers of births and deaths in Gaza for the recent period. According to these data, it can be extrapolated that since the beginning of the ceasefire in October 2025, the population has grown by approximately 17,000 (births minus deaths), approximately 1,000 have been killed in the fighting (they do not discern between civilians and combatants), and 1,800 have died of natural causes.

An attempt by Gazan civilians to organize an anti-Hamas demonstration was foiled by Hamas. Most of the organizers were members of the Fatah organization, which is Hamas’s main rival and the ruling party in Judea and Samaria. It should be noted that Fatah has not allowed elections in the areas it controls since January 2006 because all the surveys show Hamas would win.

Dr. Eado Hecht, a senior research fellow at the BESA Center, is a military analyst focusing mainly on the relationship between military theory, military doctrine, and military practice. He teaches courses on military theory and military history at Bar-Ilan University, Haifa University, and Reichman University and in a variety of courses in the Israel Defense Forces. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.