Gaza: Palestinians face a landscape of destruction

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians in Gaza face an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after a ceasefire ended more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

In the small coastal enclave, where refugee camps are spread across towns, drone footage captured by The Associated Press shows mounds of rubble spreading as far as the eye can see – the remains of the longest and deadliest war between Israel and Hamas in their bloody history.

“As you can see, it has become a ghost town,” said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose house in Rafah, in the south of the country, was razed. “There’s nothing,” he said, sitting drinking coffee in a brown armchair perched on the rubble of his three-story home, in a surreal scene.

Critics say Israel has waged a scorched earth campaign to destroy the social fabric of Gaza, accusations that are being examined by two international tribunals, including for the crime of genocide. Israel denies the accusations and says its army is fighting a complex battle in dense urban areas and is trying to avoid causing undue harm to civilians and their infrastructure.

Military experts say the reality is complicated.

“For a campaign of this duration, which is the equivalent of a year of combat in a heavily urban environment where you have an adversary hiding in the middle of that environment, you expect an extremely high level of damage,” Matthew Savill said. , director of military science at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

Savill said it was difficult to draw a general conclusion about the nature of the Israeli campaign. Doing so, he said, would require evaluating each strike and operation to determine whether they complied with the laws of armed conflict and whether all were proportional, but he did not believe the scorched earth description was accurate.

International rights groups. including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, view this vast destruction as part of a broader pattern of extermination and genocide directed against Palestinians in Gaza, an accusation that Israel denies. The groups dispute Israel’s position that the destruction was the result of military activity.

Human Rights Watch, in a November report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, said that “the destruction is so extensive that it indicates an intention to permanently displace many people.”

From a fierce air campaign in the first weeks of the war to a ground invasion that sent thousands of troops aboard tanks, the Israeli response to an attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 destroyed much of the civil infrastructure. from the Gaza Strip, displacing 90% of its population. The bright color of pre-war life has faded, giving way to a monotonous cement gray that dominates the land. It could take decades, if not moreto rebuild.

A UN assessment from satellite images showed that more than 60,000 structures across Gaza had been destroyed and more than 20,000 severely damaged during the war as of December 1, 2024. The preliminary assessment of debris generated by the conflict, including buildings and roads, was over. 50 million tonnes. The analysis has not yet been validated in the field.

Airstrikes throughout the war have toppled buildings and other structures believed to house militants. But the destruction intensified as ground forces fought Hamas fighters hand-to-hand in dense areas.

If militants were seen firing from a building near a troop exercise, forces could destroy the entire building to thwart the threat. The tracks of the tanks have eaten away at the paved roads, leaving dusty stretches of earth in their wake.

The military engineering corps was tasked with using bulldozers to clear roads, tear down buildings considered threats and blow up Hamas’ network of underground tunnels.

Experts say the tunnel neutralization operations have been extremely destructive to surface infrastructure. For example, if a 1.5 kilometer-long tunnel were destroyed by Israeli forces, it would not spare the homes or buildings above it, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer. .

“If (the tunnel) goes under an urban area, everything will be destroyed,” he said. “There is no other way to destroy a tunnel.”

Cemeteries, schools, hospitals and more were targeted and destroyed, he said, because Hamas was using them for military purposes. Secondary explosions of Hamas explosives inside these buildings could worsen the damage.

The way Israel repeatedly returned to areas it claimed to be under its control, only to be invaded again by militants, exacerbated the destruction, Savill said.

This is particularly evident in northern Gazawhere Israel launched a new campaign in early October that nearly wiped out Jabaliya, a built urban refugee camp. Jabaliya is home to the descendants of Palestinians who fled, or were forced to flee, during the war that led to the creation of Israel in 1948. Milshtein said Israel’s dismantling of the tunnel network is also responsible for the destruction which takes place there.

But the destruction is not only caused by strikes on targets. Israel has also created a buffer zone about a kilometer inside Gaza from its border with Israel, as well as in the Netzarim Corridor which bisects northern Gaza and the south, and along the Philadelphia Corridor, a stretch of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Large areas of these areas have been leveled.

Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said the buffer zones were an operational necessity intended to demarcate secure plots of land for Israeli forces. He denied that Israel cleared civilian areas indiscriminately.

This destruction, like the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, has given rise to accusations that Israel has committed war crimes, which it denies. The decisions the military makes about what to overthrow and why are an important factor in this debate.

“The moment militants enter a building and start using it to shoot at you, you start to calculate whether or not you can strike,” Savill said. Demolition of the building, he said, “must still be necessary.”

In Jabaliya, Nizar Hussein hung a sheet over the shattered remains of his family’s home, carefully stepping around a large sloping concrete slab.

“It will take us at least years to have a house,” he said. “It’s a feeling I can’t describe. Thanks to God (for everything).

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Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.