Palestinians confront a landscape of destruction in Gaza’s ‘ghost towns’
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RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinians in Gaza are confronting an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after a cease-fire paused more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Across the tiny coastal enclave, where built-up refugee camps are interspersed between cities, drone recordings captured by the Associated Press shows mounds of rubble stretching as far as the eye can see — remnants of the longest and deadliest war between Israel and the militant group Hamas in their blood-ridden history.
“As you can see, it became a ghost town,” said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose home in the southern city of Rafah was flattened.
“There is nothing,” he said, as he sat drinking coffee on a brown armchair perched on the rubble of his three-story home.
Critics say Israel has waged a campaign of scorched earth to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza, accusations that are being considered in two global courts, including the crime of genocide. Israel denies those charges and says that its military has been fighting a complex battle in dense urban areas and that it tries to avoid causing undue harm to civilians and their infrastructure.
Military experts say the reality is complicated.
Three hostages were handed over to Israeli forces — the first of 33 expected to be freed over the next six weeks in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinians. The deal follows months of negotiations.
“For a campaign of this duration, which is a year’s worth of fighting in a heavily urban environment where you have an adversary that is hiding in amongst that environment, then you would expect an extremely high level of damage,” said Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
Savill said that it was difficult to draw a broad conclusion about the nature of Israel’s campaign. To do so, he said, would require each strike and operation to be assessed to determine whether they adhered to the laws of armed conflict and whether all were proportional, but he did not think the scorched earth description was accurate.
International rights groups. including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, view the vast destruction as part of a broader pattern of extermination and genocide directed at Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel denies. The groups dispute Israel’s stance that the destruction was a result of military activity.
Human Rights Watch, in a November report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, said “the destruction is so substantial that it indicates the intention to permanently displace many people.”
From a fierce air campaign during the first weeks of the war, to a ground invasion that sent in thousands of troops on tanks, the Israeli response to a deadly Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has ground down much of the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. The militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 more hostage. More than 90 captives are still in Gaza, around a third of whom are believed to be dead.
One of the Israeli hostages freed in the Gaza cease-fire said she has ‘returned to life.’ Palestinians return to Rafah to find widespread destruction.
Israel’s attacks have killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health authorities, who do not differentiate between civilians and combatants but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities.
And about 90% of Gaza’s population has been displaced. The brilliant color of prewar life has faded into a monotone cement gray that dominates the territory. It could take decades, if not more, to rebuild.
A United Nations assessment from satellite imagery showed more than 60,000 structures across Gaza had been destroyed and more than 20,000 severely damaged in the war as of Dec. 1, 2024. The preliminary assessment of conflict-generated debris, including of buildings and roads, was more than 50 million tons. It said the analysis had not yet been validated in the field.
Palestinians in Gaza are eager to leave miserable tent camps and return to their homes if a long-awaited cease-fire agreement halts the Israel-Hamas war.
Airstrikes throughout the war toppled buildings and other structures said to be housing militants. But the destruction intensified with the ground forces, who battled Hamas fighters in close combat in dense areas.
If militants were seen firing from an apartment building near a troop maneuver, forces might take the entire building down to thwart the threat. Tank tracks chewed up paved roads, leaving stretches of dirt in their wake.
The military’s engineering corps was tasked with using bulldozers to clear routes, downing buildings seen as threats, and blowing up Hamas’ underground tunnel network.
Experts say the operations to neutralize tunnels were extremely destructive to surface infrastructure. For example, if a mile-long tunnel was blown up by Israeli forces, it would not spare homes or buildings above, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer.
“If [the tunnel] passes under an urban area, it all gets destroyed,” he said. “There’s no other way to destroy a tunnel.”
Cemeteries, schools, hospitals and more were targeted and destroyed, he said, because Hamas was using these for military purposes. Secondary blasts from Hamas explosives inside these buildings could worsen the damage.
The way Israel has repeatedly returned to areas it said were under its control, only to have militants overrun it again, has exacerbated the destruction, Savill said.
That’s evident especially in northern Gaza, where Israel launched a new campaign in early October that almost obliterated Jabaliya, a built-up, urban refugee camp. Jabaliya is home to the descendants of Palestinians who fled, or were forced to flee, during the war that led to Israel‘s creation in 1948. Milshtein said Israel’s dismantling of the tunnel network is also to blame for the destruction there.
But the destruction was not only the result of strikes on targets. Israel also carved out a buffer zone more than half a mile inside Gaza from its border with Israel, as well as within the Netzarim corridor that bisects north Gaza from the south, and along the Philadelphi Corridor, a stretch of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Vast swaths in these areas were leveled.
Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said the buffer zones were an operational necessity meant to carve out secure plots of land for Israeli forces. He denied Israel had cleared civilian areas indiscriminately.
The destruction, like the civilian death toll in Gaza, has raised accusations that Israel committed war crimes, which it denies. The decisions the military made in choosing what to topple, and why, are an important factor in that debate.
“The second militants move into a building and start using it to fire on you, you start making a calculation about whether or not you can strike,” Savill said. Downing the building, he said, “still needs to be necessary.”
In Jabaliya, Nizar Hussein hung a sheet over the shattered remains of his family’s home, stepping gingerly around a large, leaning concrete slab.
“At the very least, we need years to get a house,” he said. “It is a feeling that I cannot describe.”
Hana and Goldenberg write for the Associated Press. Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv.
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