Mohamed al Najjar, a 24-year-old law student, took advantage of the first day of the ceasefire on Sunday to return to his family residence in Rafah, in the far south of Gaza. What was found, eight months after fleeing the arrival of Israeli troops, was a mountain of rubble. “We have nothing left,” he summarizes through text and video messages sent by phone. Around it, most of the houses have the same appearance in the middle of streets where there is not even asphalt left.
In the images you can see inhabitants who, like him, wander around to see what remains of the border town with Egypt devastated by intense fighting. In Rafah, the leader of Hamas, Yahia Sinwar, died in October, near a tunnel where at the end of July six hostages captured during the attack by the fundamentalist militia on October 7, 2023 had been murdered before the arrival of the Israeli military.
“This was my house, a six-story building. Why should we return to Rafah? To cry? We cannot return to this house that took us 30 years to build,” says Al Najjar, frustrated, looking at the camera over the ruins where until last May he lived with a dozen relatives in a building that housed fifty neighbors. More than 163,000 buildings, around two-thirds of those in all of Gaza, have been destroyed, according to analysis of UN satellite images, which coincide with estimates from the University of Oregon (United States).
The level of destruction is of such magnitude that being able to return to their places of origin, to their streets, to their neighborhoods does not mean for Gazans that they will be able to inhabit them again, at least in the coming months. The reality of the ruins has pushed Al Najjar to turn back almost immediately towards Deir el Balah, a town in the center of the Strip and ten kilometers from Rafah, where he settled with his family. “There is no habitable place in Rafah,” he concludes.
Since the war began on October 7, 2023 with the Hamas massacre of some 1,200 people in Israeli territory, some two million Gazans (of the total 2.3 million) have been forced to move (some several times) through the attacks and forced movement orders from the Israeli army. A report last November by Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounces the “forced, massive and deliberate” displacement of almost the entire population repeatedly and “without compelling military reason.”
The difficulties of transportation, with hardly any fuel and many destroyed vehicles, represent an added problem. Al Najjar details that he first arrived by car to Khan Yunis and, from there, reached Rafah on foot. But he adds that, right now, he has no other plan than to wait in the same place where he has found refuge since May, in Deir el Balah.
Bodies in the rubble
Like Al Najjar, many of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from Gaza in the last 15 months of war are taking advantage of the truce with Israel to try to return to the places from which they were expelled by bombs and the army, which NGOs such as HRW They consider “war crimes and crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing.” There are neighbors who return knowing that their houses are not standing, but they do so to try to locate among the rubble the bodies of relatives who are still missing, says the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Around fifty bodies have been found in Khan Yunis in the last few hours, emergency services report. The Hamas Government estimates that there may be thousands to be located, which would add to the more than 47,000 deaths officially recorded in the Strip due to Israeli attacks.
In any case, there are no figures on population movements at the moment, despite the images of columns of people advancing along the roads on foot, in cars or carts pulled by donkeys. Not all areas of the Strip are accessible anymore, especially the north. They will be as the truce process progresses, the occupation troops are placed in the rear and the Israeli authorities give the go-ahead for citizens to move more freely. The inhabitants who manage to access what were their homes document with their mobile phones scenes of devastated neighborhoods in which laughing children sometimes appear waving the Palestinian flag after the end of the attacks.
Mustafa Ibrahim, a 62-year-old retiree and member of the human rights organization Addameer, is already preparing to return to Gaza City in the company of his wife and three children, although he knows in advance that his home is destroyed. He hopes that Israeli authorities will give the go-ahead in the coming days. “I’ll have to rent a house, although we don’t know where to look. Life is going to be complicated and rent will be high because the number of homes that have not been destroyed is small. In addition, the water supply, sanitation, electricity network and internet have also been destroyed,” he explains in messages sent via mobile phone from Deir el Balah.
On October 13, 2023, Ibrahim escaped amid attacks from the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City to Rafah, where he was taken in by his brothers. From there, the family fled again last May to Deir el Balah in a journey that hundreds of thousands of people have repeated. Ibrahim is nevertheless “optimistic” and “hopeful” with the truce and in the face of a stage that he believes should focus on reconstruction despite political differences. Mohamed Al Najjar also clings to the ceasefire as a step towards ending the conflict.
The Israeli army announced this Tuesday that, if the agreement with Hamas is maintained, next week it will allow the population to return to the north. In the northern area is located the main population center of the enclave, Gaza City, and some of the most affected towns, such as Jabalia, Beit Lahia or Beit Hanun. In addition to keeping the Netzarim military corridor closed, which divides the Strip in two, a military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, warns of the danger of approaching the border with Israel, as well as bathing on the beach or fishing in the sea.
Under the remains of Mohamed al Najjar’s home in Rafah is the documentation that the young man is trying to recover so he can be treated again abroad for his retinal problems. He already had surgery in Valencia in 2009, when he was a child, and his wish now is to be able to obtain a new visa.
