When Israeli ground forces advanced en masse into the Gaza Strip on Friday evening, just after the Jewish Sabbath began, they did it so secretly that it was hours before the outside world understood what had happened.

In the three days since the long-anticipated invasion began, Israel’s military has operated with a similar ambiguity, defying expectations by carrying out a more incremental ground operation than was initially anticipated. While it has continued to decimate Gaza and its people with aerial bombardments, much of the ground force appears to have hung back from Gaza City, Hamas’ stronghold in northern Gaza and stayed instead in the countryside on the city’s fringes.

Under US pressure to temper their response to the Hamas killing of more than 1,400 people on Israeli soil, Israel has even avoided describing the operation as an invasion. The loss of life, though, in Gaza continues to rise, with the Palestinian death toll so far over 8,000, according to Hamas officials.

“Everything is happening in darkness,” said Andreas Krieg, a war expert at King’s College, London, adding that “there’s a very small group of people who actually know what’s going on, even inside Israel.”

The goal of such strategic ambiguity is three-fold, analysts say.

First, it keeps Hamas uncertain about Israel’s next steps. And, at least for now, it allows Israeli soldiers to maintain a siege of Gaza City, where Hamas has dug a network of underground tunnels and fortifications. By doing so, Israel avoids — or at least puts off — bloody urban combat inside the city.

The fog may also buy Israel some time.

Not only it may help put off scrutiny from both internal and external critics, it also gives Israel a chance to assess the plans of Hamas allies like Hezbollah, a militia in Lebanon that has exchanged fire with Israel in recent days. Israeli officials fear the militia may be weighing a more forceful attack of its own.

“Modern war is conducted not only with tanks and airplanes,” Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, said in a phone interview. “It’s a cyberwar, a psychological war, and an informational war.”

The shroud of secrecy began late on Friday afternoon, when Israel jammed Gaza’s Internet and telecoms networks, according to senior US officials, stopping people in Gaza from sharing what they were seeing.

Soon after, the air force bombarded Gaza City with a massive barrage of missiles, intended to drive Hamas fighters into their tunnel network.

Then, shortly after 6pm (local time), a vast phalanx of tanks, armoured vehicles, bulldozers, infantrymen and combat engineers entered northern Gaza — unseen and unreported. Another column entered central Gaza, approaching Gaza City from the south.

With communications down, it would have been hard for Hamas to fully grasp what was happening, or to prepare a response, Krieg said. Palestinian civilians, too, were plunged into terror and uncertainty, unable to reach one another to learn what was happening.

Within Israel, officials had also worked to deflect attention away from the invasion.

On Friday morning, medical teams were told to hold an hours-long rehearsal to prepare for how they might deal with the release of scores of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, according to a senior medical official. For some, that fostered the impression that Israel was on the verge of a major breakthrough in back-channel negotiations to free the hostages, rather than making last-minute arrangements for an invasion.

Once the operation began, army spokespeople stopped answering their phones. The information blackout was complete.

It was three hours before the military ambiguously announced that it was “expanding ground activity”, and six hours before a military spokesperson confirmed that troops were inside Gaza.

On Saturday, the military was still avoiding describing their advance as an invasion, merely noting that the troops remained inside the territory. Only that evening did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally announce the “second stage” of the war, 24 hours after it started.

And even after that, the military kept a veil over its activity. On Monday it released only limited information, conveying the impression of a controlled, low-intensity advance.

Netanyahu, speaking to reporters, emphatically rejected appeals for a ceasefire as “calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism.” Asked about the Gaza death toll, Netanyahu said: “Not a single civilian has to die.”

The military released unverified footage that appeared to show Israeli tanks moving slowly down beaches in northern Gaza.

The clips also showed Israeli bulldozers reshaping the terrain, possibly to ease the tanks’ passage or to destroy tunnel infrastructure.