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SSpread to the horizon in front of Saeed, a Palestinian father of two, is a staggering level of destruction that few could imagine. Apartment buildings in this north Gaza The cities have been so destroyed that they have turned into dust. It’s hard to even call it debris – it looks like ash.
“This is the location of our house. Nothing is visible,” Saeed says, pointing to an invisible mountain of gray, a sob in his voice. “Erashed. Evaporated. It’s as if there was never a home here.”
as soon as the US mediated ceasefire between israel and Hamas came into effect at noon on Friday, Saeed, 34, was one of The first person to take the deadly risk of moving north To find his home. Displaced countless times since the beginning of Israel’s unprecedented two-year bombardment and siege of Gaza, they had hoped to at least recover some valuables from their home, such as photographs.
“When I came back today I expected my house to be a collapsed building so we could get stuff out,” he told The Independent, sending video and photos of the scene.
“But everything has been razed to the ground. There is nothing to save, nothing usable. Piles of debris stretch as far as the eye can see.”
This is Beit Lahiya in the far north of Gaza – one of the most destroyed areas in the besieged cordon. From inside a Jordanian aid plane over Gaza, The Independent filmed unprecedented destruction These exact neighborhoods were wreaked havoc by Israeli forces. The whole area looks like Saeed’s street: reduced to the bottom of a fire pit of ash.
More than 90 percent of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed united nations Said earlier this year. A joint assessment by the United Nations, the European Union and the World Bank estimates that it will cost more than $53 billion for strip recovery and reconstruction.
That process will take decades, even generations. Last year, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said that even if the war stops, if Gaza remains under Israeli blockade, its battered economy could take 350 years to return to pre-war levels.
and that was before Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest attackwhich was centered on Gaza City, the most populous and heavily built-up area of the besieged enclave. This is the reality, as the ceasefire begins, that Palestinian families now face.
Israel launched an unprecedented bombardment and siege of Gaza following Hamas’s bloody October 7 attacks on southern Israel, where, according to Israeli estimates, more than 1,100 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
In the two years since then, Palestinian health officials say more than 67,000 people have died, including thousands of children. The level of genocide is so high that a UN commission of inquiry concluded last month that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza – a charge Israel strongly denies.
Now a ray of hope is visible. US President Donald Trump announced a peace deal this week, heralding it as a “significant breakthrough” that will bring “permanent peace, hopefully an everlasting peace, in the Middle East…”
Its first phase, a ceasefire The deal came into effect on Friday afternoon.
Under the terms agreed to by all parties, Hamas is required to release all 48 remaining hostages and detainees, both dead and alive, within a 72-hour period, reportedly ending on Monday afternoon. Additionally, about 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, some of them serving life sentences and some arrested since the conflict began, will be released in October 2023.
During this process, Israeli forces withdrew to what is called the “Yellow Line”, which remains several kilometers deep into Gaza. Israeli government spokesman Shosh Bedrosia said this would still leave Israel in control of 53% of the enclave.
There will also be a huge increase in desperately needed aid to Gaza, where the U.N.-backed Global Hunger Monitor said famine emerged earlier this year.
As the settlement began, thousands of civilians forced to flee the south began the long journey north to their homes – many on foot. The United Nations estimates that more than 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million are displaced.
Among them was Abdullah Sharshara, 37, who says he walked 27 kilometers through the destruction to find his home. On the way he described seeing a donkey cart that had been bombed earlier, killing an entire family that had tried to make the same journey just before them.
He told The Independent, “Tank marks were clearly visible on the road. It looked as if bulldozers had pulled up the bodies and buried them under mounds of earth, as evidenced by the stench of death.”
Abdullah says the destruction is so great, it has actually changed the horizon, so from his road he is able to see hills inside Israel for the first time because so much has been leveled. He also found that his apartment in northern Gaza was destroyed and uninhabitable, the surrounding roads were destroyed by bulldozers and his father’s house had been converted into an Israeli field command center.
He says the flat was filled with spent ammunition and the walls were covered with Hebrew graffiti.
He said, “There were sausages, bacon and remnants of sweets on the living room table. I haven’t eaten properly for two years because of hunger.”
Widespread hunger and disease and large numbers of injuries are of immediate concern.
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said UN agencies had 170,000 metric tons of food, medicine and other supplies ready to go into Gaza. He said the first step is to get hundreds of trucks helping every day. Many fear that if Israel continues to impose sanctions it will be a logistical challenge given the level of destruction in the Strip.
He said, “We will increase the provision of food across Gaza to reach the 2.1 million people who need food assistance and about 500,000 people who need nutrition. Famine must be reversed in areas where it has taken hold and stopped in others.”
Wala al-Din Karjah, director of the Gaza-based charity Development Forum, said his estimates show they need at least 1,000 trucks a day of all supplies, including shelter materials, medicines and drinking water, to meet needs.
“My fear for the future is that this agreement will be temporary, the ceasefire will break down and we will return to killing, destruction and starvation,” he said.
Another concern is the number of seriously injured and sick people inside Gaza. The World Health Organization said the healthcare system had been “shattered” by the two-year war.
Richard Pepperkorn, WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territory, said they would start by increasing deliveries of medical supplies but that the burden “will not be reduced overnight”.
They called for unhindered access to Gaza and the unhindered entry of medical supplies by all routes, and importantly called for the resumption of medical evacuation from Gaza to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which was possible before the war. This is the only way to effectively deal with the massive backlog of seriously injured and ill patients on the medical evacuation list in Gaza.
Dr. Bassam Zakout, director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, said he estimated there were about 15,000 patients on the evacuation list, 4,000 of whom were children. But that was also complicated.
“All these issues need to be reevaluated, because they have been out of treatment for a long time, or were receiving treatment based on what was available,” he said.
They were also concerned that the ceasefire would not be permanent and that Israel would continue the partial blockade, which would hamper their ability to respond to a large-scale medical crisis.
Tamara al-Rifa, spokeswoman for the UN Palestinian refugee agency, said another issue is that UNRWA is still under sanctions by Israel, with 12,000 staff still in Gaza and working, despite being the largest aid agency in the Strip.
“UNRWA is the only agency with the kind of infrastructure that can absorb the influx of supplies,” he said.
Civilians who have survived the assault on Gaza had hoped that a ceasefire would mean they could finally go home, but the pause in fighting has only left them thinking about a bleak future.
Saeed reported that the destruction in Beit Lahiya was so great that they had to return to their tents in the south again: “The destruction was huge. Nothing remained of our neighbourhood, the city of Beit Lahiya or the surrounding area.
“There was devastation left and right. We decided to return south because the area is empty. There is no life there.”