A war with no accredited war correspondents

We have become so used to having wars via CNN, BBC, The Times, the New York Times and the myriads of other media outlets sending reporters to be attached to military units to inform the world of what is happening. But this latest war, Israel's offensive in Gaza, is effectivey being carried out in a news blackout. Most of the time reporters are having to make intelligent assumptions about what the Israeli Defence Forces are doing. Apart from the briefest of updates from IDF spokesmen and the occasional thundering speech by Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the most detail is coming from Hamas and that, for obvious reasons, cannot be relied on. We know there are now scores of Israeli tanks inside Gaza, aiming to encircle Gaza City where Hamas has its command headquarters buried under a hospital but very little else has been revealed apart from the relentless daily and nightly airstrikes. Now we are told there have been exchanges of gunfire between IDF troops and Hamas in the tunnels, the so-called Gaza Metro. But are these just minor skirmishes or is the IDF really going to go full ahead with flooding the tunnels with special forces and combat engineering units? Some of the tunnels have low ceilings and are narrow, making it difficult to pass through quickly, let alone safely. If this was in the Iraq War there would by now have been breathless reports from TV, radio and newspaper war correspondents about the underground firefights. But this is a war carried out in secrecy.