“All houses have been reduced to rubble,” Najjar told AFP in Jabalia.
Jabalia:
Mohammed Al-Najjar, a 33-year-old Gazan, said on Saturday he was “shocked” and felt “lost” when he returned home only to find much of the Jabalia refugee camp in ruins after an Israeli offensive.
“All houses have been reduced to rubble,” Najjar told AFP in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip.
“You are lost, you don’t know where exactly your home is in the middle of this enormous destruction.”
Israeli forces in recent weeks carried out a massive bombing campaign in Jabalia, part of a fierce ground offensive in northern Gaza – an area the army said was outside the control of Hamas militants.
“I was shocked by the extent of the destruction during the latest aggression against the Jabalia camp,” Najjar said.
In recent days, AFP correspondents have seen dozens of Palestinians pouring into the area, trying to find their homes and rescue what remains.
Men, women and children walked through the streets where their houses once stood, now full of gray concrete slabs.
Nearly every street in the camp was lined with charred furniture, beds and mangled iron doors, an area once bustling with activity and home to more than 100,000 people, according to UN figures from before the war.
Many families carried their belongings on donkey carts, while others walked with beds and mattresses on their heads.
“We have no place but our homes,” said Suad Abu Salah, 47, who has also returned after fleeing the area earlier in the war between Israel and Hamas, now approaching its eighth month.
But “Jabalia has been wiped off the map,” she said.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 who the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 36,379 people, mostly civilians, according to Israel’s Health Ministry.
– ‘Stay on our land’ –
Despite the destruction, Najjar said people were “determined” to return to the neighborhoods they left to avoid the fighting.
Residents were willing to “set up tents and temporary shelters in the middle of the rubble,” he said, even though “there is fear, fear that the (Israeli) occupation could return.”
‘But we stay on our land. We don’t have anywhere else.’
On Friday, the Israeli army announced it had completed its mission in eastern Jabalia, where it had previously said Hamas militants had regrouped.
On Saturday, residents of Jabalia said they could still hear continuous gunfire and artillery shelling from the east.
New fighting broke out in the north in early May, around the same time that Israeli forces took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
In the latest operation, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of seven hostages in Jabalia, and last month the army reported “perhaps the fiercest” fighting there since the war began.
Mahmud Assaliyah, 50, said that “houses in Jabalia have been torn apart and entire apartment buildings have been completely destroyed.”
“There is not a single house that is not targeted by the Israeli occupation army.”
He returns and discovers that his house has also been razed to the ground.
“Cement pillars have fallen, walls have been destroyed, furniture has been scattered, burned and torn apart,” Assaliyah said.
Abu Salah said many residents are tired of being displaced and just want to stay put no matter what.
“We want to live like other people in the world,” she said.
“We need a solution and an end to this war so that we can live in peace.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
