Palestinians confront a landscape of destruction in Gaza's 'ghost towns'

AP , Tuesday 21 Jan 2025

Palestinians in Gaza are confronting an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after a ceasefire paused more than 15 months of genocidal Israeli war.

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Photo: WAFA

 

Across the tiny coastal Palestinian territory, where built-up refugee camps are interspersed between cities, drone footage captured by The Associated Press shows mounds of rubble stretching as far as the eye can see — remnants of the longest and deadliest Israeli war.

“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, in a surreal scene.

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, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) including war crimes and the crime of genocide. Israel denies those charges and says 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.

“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 war. 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.

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. 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.”


Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP

From a fierce air campaign during the first weeks of the war, to a ground invasion that sent thousands of troops in on tanks, the Israeli deadly attacks has ground down much of the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, displacing 90% of its population.

The brilliant color of pre-war life has faded into a monotone cement gray that dominates the territory. It could take decades, if not more, to rebuild.

Airstrikes throughout the war toppled buildings and other structures said to be housing militants. But the destruction intensified with the Israeli occupation ground forces operating in dense areas.

If resistance militants were seen firing from an apartment building near a troop maneuver, forces also take the entire building down to thwart the threat. Tank tracks chewed up paved roads, leaving dusty stretches of earth in their wake.

The military’s engineering corps was tasked with using bulldozers to clear routes and blowing up buildings.

Experts say the operations to neutralize alleged tunnels were extremely destructive to surface infrastructure. For example, if a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) long tunnel was blown up by Israeli occupation forces, it would not spare homes or buildings above, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer.

Cemeteries, schools, hospitals and more were targeted and destroyed, he said.

The way Israel has repeatedly returned to areas it said were under its control has exacerbated the destruction, Savill said.

That’s evident especially in northern Gaza, where Israel launched ethnic cleansing operations in early October that almost obliterated Jabaliya, a built up, urban refugee camp.

Jabaliya is home to the descendants of Palestinians who were forced to flee by Zionist terrorists, during the war that led to Israel‘s creation in 1948. 

Israel also carved out a buffer zone about a kilometer 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.

The destruction, like the civilian death toll in Gaza, has raised accusations that Israel committed war crimes.


A boy drinks water from the tap of a dispenser in his hand by the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP


People walk past destroyed and heavily-damaged buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP


The sun sets over destroyed and collapsed buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP

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