Residents who returned to the northern Gaza city of Jabaliya on Friday expected to find massive devastation, but said they were still shocked by the level of ruin they saw after three weeks of an Israeli offensive in the dense urban area. .
“The destruction is indescribable,” said Mohammad Awais, who returned with his family to their home in Jabaliya on Friday. “Our minds are not able to comprehend what we are seeing.”
He said he and his family walked along devastated roads for nearly an hour in the heat and saw that no vehicles could navigate streets blocked by piles of rubble from homes and shops that had been destroyed by the Israeli army.
As they walked, they passed lifeguards carrying the wounded and the bodies of the deceased on stretchers. Some bodies were found in the streets, others had been dug up and removed from the rubble and were already beginning to decompose, said Awais, a social media marketing specialist.
“Not even ambulances can pass through them to transport the wounded and the martyrs,” he said of the streets of Jabaliya.
The Israeli army said on Friday it had ended its offensive in eastern Jabaliya and withdrew after recovering the bodies of seven hostages, killing hundreds of fighters and destroying several kilometers of a network of underground tunnels.
Satellite images captured in late May by Planet Labs showed the extent of the destruction in a southern part of the city and in the area near the market.
Some buildings had already been destroyed before the latest Israeli offensive in the area, according to images from April. But by late May, many more structures in those areas appeared flattened and almost all vegetation had been razed.
Mr Awais and his family are among the few residents who still have a place to return to. His house was only partially damaged. On Friday they began cleaning up parts of collapsed walls, broken wood and glass, and ruined furniture to make his house habitable again. But the family supermarket, which had to close in December as a result of the Israeli siege of Gaza, was completely destroyed, he said.
“There is debris everywhere,” he added.
On May 11, the Israeli military said it had renewed its offensive in Jabaliya because Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that led the October 7 attack, was trying to rebuild its infrastructure and operations in the area. At the time, Hamas accused Israel of “intensifying its aggression against civilians throughout Gaza” and vowed to keep fighting.
Israel invaded northern Gaza for the first time after weeks of carrying out an intense air assault against the enclave following the October 7 attack. The army has launched numerous deadly attacks on Jabaliya. Having survived the assault during the first months of the war, many people in Jabaliya thought they were safe from another Israeli offensive.
“Residents returned with tears in their eyes,” said Hossam Shbat, a journalist in Gaza. “All we see is rubble, destruction and ruins. And more massacres.”
He added: “Residents have returned to see what no one can imagine: the destruction of businesses, infrastructure and shelters that housed thousands of displaced people.”
Jabaliya is often called a camp because it was established more than 70 years ago by Palestinian refugees who were expelled or forced to flee their homes in present-day Israel during the creation of the state. They were never allowed to return to their homes and Jabaliya grew into a community populated by the refugees and their descendants.
In a video Shbat recorded on Thursday, he shows the ruins of Jabaliya around him. Behind him, in the shell of a four-story building, fires were still burning in the rubble.
“We can’t describe it in words,” he said in an interview. “The occupying army intentionally destroyed all essential elements of life.”