Every building within sight seemed to have been affected by the war.
Khan Younis:
“It smells like death,” Maha Tell, a mother of four, said on Sunday as she returned to the devastated southern Gaza city of Khan Younis after Israeli troops withdrew.
“We don’t have a city anymore, just rubble. Nothing is left. When I walked through the streets, I couldn’t help but cry,” the 38-year-old told AFP.
“All the streets were bulldozed. There was a smell… I saw people digging up and taking out bodies,” said Thiel, whose house was partially destroyed.
Soon after the Israeli army announced its withdrawal, scenes of devastation began to emerge – with residents of Khan Younis returning to search for the remains of their homes.
Before October 7, nearly 400,000 people lived in Khan Yunis and its surrounding areas. Much of the area is now in ruins after months of bombing and fierce fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.
A group of men and boys rode donkey carts, bicycles and the odd pickup truck, heading north from Rafah in the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians are fleeing Israel’s relentless ground invasion and bombing.
They passed the burned-out shell of Salam Hospital, with nearly all the surrounding buildings razed to the ground.
Tal, from the western Hamad district of Khan Younis, said she was “very shocked and sad”.
“There were no walls or windows. Most of the towers were completely blown out,” she said.
Thiel said she would move back to her heavily damaged apartment, which “is not habitable but better than a tent.”
Her neighbor suffered greater misfortune. “They find their homes destroyed and they don’t know where to go,” she said.
Other Gazans carry a mattress on their head, hoping there are four walls left to fit inside.
A man leaving Rafah on Sunday climbed to the top of a pile of rubble in Khan Younis, where a home once stood.
AFP photos showed everything around the man in ruins, as he stood among broken concrete and corrugated iron roofs.
Every building within sight seemed to have been affected by the war.
Other images showed large swaths of the city being leveled.
The Israeli army told AFP it had withdrawn its 98th Ground Force on Sunday from the southern city to “rest and recuperate”, and an official told Israeli media that Israel had killed thousands of Hamas fighters there.
An army official told Haaretz: “There is no need for us to stay… We are doing everything we can.”
Israeli data shows that the war in Gaza broke out on October 7 when Hamas militants launched an attack that killed 1,170 people, most of them civilians.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 33,175 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-controlled territory.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
