Questions in rocket-hit Sderot over whether IDF can ever destroy Hamas

The two men, faces blurred and voices disguised, are screened by a dense scrub of fig and trailing vine and thorns in northern Gaza as they film themselves loading a rocket launcher.

It is daylight and the fighters, wearing civilian clothes, work quickly and calmly, the sound of fighting audible around them as they prepare the weapon in less than a minute. Metal scrapes on metal as four missiles are slotted into tubes and wires connected to a red timer for launch against the nearby Israeli border city of Sderot and neighbouring communities.

Posted on social media by the Al-Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the footage appears to show missiles being prepared for an attack last week that damaged a storage shed in a neighbourhood of low villas lining narrow streets.

In neighbourhoods of Sderot such as the one hit last week, it is hard to escape the consequences of the strikes. Damage is visible where rockets have struck walls or punched through red-tiled roofs, blue sheeting patching one badly damaged building.

Six months into Israel’s war against Hamas, a conflict that has levelled whole neighbourhoods in Gaza and killed 34,000 Palestinians in the coastal territory, Sderot is still being hit.

While the city’s residents have long experience of rocket fire coming out of Gaza, the return to the situation that existed before the 7 October Hamas attack, which killed 70 people in the neighbourhood, is causing anxiety.

The continued targeting of Sderot, long held up by Israeli leaders and officials as a security bellwether, has raised questions among Israelis about the war and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s, repeated promise of a “total victory” against Hamas and other groups.

If Sderot has been here before, it is because when the threat of rockets fired from Gaza emerged almost a quarter of a century ago, it was one of the principal targets.

Related: ‘The memories are too much’: Sderot residents return six months after Hamas attack

In those days, organised tours would take visiting politicians and journalists to see what life in Sderot was like under “grad” fire, to see remnants of rockets in the media centre housed in a converted bungalow, and observe the damage done. The city, the guides would explain, was the “bomb shelter capital of the world”.

Today, those bomb shelters remain on every street, many painted with gaudy murals. All that has changed is that, in the aftermath of 7 October, many are now equipped with doors that can be locked from the inside, evidence that the threat, far from lessening, has developed.

And while rocket alerts have dropped significantly since the high point of the first weeks of the war, the threat has far from disappeared.

In the past two months alone 70 rockets have been fired towards the Sderot region, including several attacks in the past week.

Significantly, the rockets that targeted Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod last week were fired not from Rafah, where Israeli leaders are threatening a new offensive, but from northern Gaza, whose distant ruins are visible from the edge of the city.

The rocket fire led to an IDF announcement that it was preparing to raid two neighbourhoods in Beit Lahia, the site of the rocket launches.

This week a steady stream of tour groups came to view the site of Sderot’s now demolished police station, taken over briefly by Hamas gunmen on 7 October. A poster promised a memorial would be built there and flags were tied to the tangles of rebar still sticking from the ground.

Among the visitors were Lisa and Eli Ovadia, from Petah Tikva, a sprawling central city immediately adjacent to Tel Aviv.

“It’s still not safe here,” Lisa said. “It needs to be made safe. And if Sderot is not safe, then Israel is not safe.”

“It will never be made safe until Hamas is destroyed,” Eli added. “We need to go into Rafah and kill every last Hamasnik.”

Eli was sceptical that Israel had the international support for a ground incursion. “Biden won’t let us finish the job,” he said.

Others have suggested, in interviews with Israeli media, that a push by the authorities to get people to return to Sderot, including financial incentives, was driving the renewed efforts to hit the city.

“I have a bad intuition,” Oshrat Hazot told Israel’s Channel 12 while packing in Tel Aviv to return last month. “I feel that when we go back there, everything will start again because Hamas knows that they [the Israeli government] set us a return date.”

The bigger question for many is whether the IDF’s objective of completely destroying Hamas is an achievable goal. Recent polling suggests a majority of Israelis think the likelihood is “fairly low” or “very low”.

That sentiment was backed by an assessment by US intelligence agencies, released in March.

“Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come,” the report stated, “and the military will struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces.”

Israeli officials recently told the New York Times that about 3,000-4,000 Hamas fighters were still present in the areas of northern Gaza closest to Sderot, despite Israel’s claims to have completed major combat operations there.

Michael Milshtein, from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, believes that while a lot of Hamas’s offensive military capacity has been degraded, the “catch-22” facing Israeli security policy is that without a full Israeli occupation, for which there is no political will or international support, Israel will be forced to confront the threat of Hamas in Gaza.

“There has been a reset,” Milshtein said. But what is clear is that the reset is not a return to the pre-rocket days. “We can’t erase Hamas. It has not gone away. It has suffered dramatic damage. But it will be around for dozens of years to come.”

Outside one of Sderot’s strip malls, a man emerged carrying a toddler. He did not want to give his name but said he had returned a month before from staying with his wife’s family. “It’s strange being back here. We’re still at war. At night you can hear guns in the distance. They are still shooting rockets at us.”

In his wine shop, Yoav Buskila described how the outlook of those living and working in Sderot had changed since 7 October. “We lived with the rockets for 20 years,” the 61-year-old said. “And we accepted it. But now something has to change. We need a big war that finishes Hamas.”