The first glimpse of Khan Younis, a Gaza city that is now in ruins
Khan Younis: A devastated city in the middle of the Gazan War. Israelis are concerned about the level of destruction in the Gaza Strip
Anas Baba reported in Khan Younis. Daniel reported from Tel Aviv. Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London. Jawad Rizkallah contributed to this story from Beirut.
“The palm tree was over here, and they went and ripped it out,” the mother cries. “My beloved Mohammad, where have you gone, my dear? My dear, I have come for you.
She’s back to find the trees uprooted. She is afraid her son’s body may have been dug up. Israeli troops have exhumed graves, looking for the remains of Israeli captives, and have returned bodies of Palestinians to Gaza throughout the war. Israel said that it retrieved a body from the city over the weekend.
She says she had been sheltering in the courtyard of the hospital with her family at the beginning of the battle, in December, when her son was shot and killed on the hospital grounds as he was on his way to purchase some items.
The main medical complex in the city is empty. The walls of the hospital rooms have Israeli soldiers writing on them. The writing was to let other soldiers know that the room had been searched.
Israeli soldiers left Hebrew graffiti spray-painted on the outside of destroyed homes. Some left messages with the names of their girlfriends. “Noa, now also all of Khan Younis knows that you are the love of my life,” reads one Hebrew message on the balcony of a destroyed building.
“Oh world, we have been destroyed and our houses have been destroyed,” chants Sami Irbaya in an improvised lament, as he walks his bicycle along a cinderblock-strewn street.
Palestinians returned to the city so they wouldn’t be victims of looters. They salvaged couches, plastic chairs and clothes from their homes and drove them back to their tents in the south.
“The level of destruction in Khan Younis is way beyond description,” says municipality spokesman Saeb Laqan. “Most of the displaced who came back today had to go back to their sheltering tents in Rafah after seeing the level of the disaster.”
Most Palestinians have left the Gaza Strip. Homes, buildings and streets there were destroyed by Israeli bombardment. While Palestinians are not allowed to go back to north Gaza, Israelis are.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel has dismantled Hamas as a functioning military unit in the area. Israel has withdrawn most of its ground troops from Gaza.
There is a woman with her purse by the gray hills of cement. Her damaged building, one of the few left standing, is blocked by a mound of rubble.
Then, she and her husband buckle their son in the child seat, and drive off to her family’s house for a final day of mourning for her uncle, who was stabbed and killed at a southern Israeli gas station last month by a man who grew up in Gaza.
Hen David picks up her two-year-old from the daycare. She returned with her family after the schools reopened. The wall and soldier are still not enough for her to feel secure.
Sderot adapted to years of rocket fire from Gaza by building rocket-proofed schools. The city reopened last month and each school is now guarded by a soldier.
Chen looks into Gaza and says it is a mix of sadness and happiness. “We are winning the war against them, but we never know what is going to happen after that.”
Gaza’s health ministry says the Israeli offensive has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians. Israel says more than 12,000 of them are affiliated with Hamas.
At the edge of Sderot there is a hilltop where you can pay more than a dollar for a chance to look across the border to north Gaza, where there are destroyed homes and piles of rubble. Further in the distance, a large plume of smoke rises.
“We cannot give them [the] option to come back to their home. We can [have a] discussion about that just after, when we’re finished with Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad,” Mayor Davidi says, referencing the two main militant groups in Gaza. “If we need, and the world wants, to build a new neighborhood in Gaza, so be it very, very far away from us.”
“If they have the chance, they will kill everyone here,” he says. You can break us, but we are here, and I think that the flag of Israel shows that.
The mayor made that point on a visit to north Gaza with Israeli troops. He planted the flag of his city in the middle of a destroyed central square in Gaza City.
An Israeli Parachuting Unit in the Hamas-Leading War: Returning to Sderot, Israel Gaza Oct. 7
One recent morning, a teacher asked her fourth-grade class: “What is trauma?” The kids shout answers: “Anxiety.” Something bad happened to us. “Something you don’t want to remember.”
The teachers were taught by psychologists how to help their students. They tell students they can go under their desks for a safe space when they feel panicked.
The gunfire that started that day made her mom tell her to close the windows because she saw the Hamas pickup trucks driving in. The Israeli soldiers were on their balcony.
Rakefet Ritz and her mother didn’t leave the safe room for two days during the beginning of the war. She took on the role of comforting her mother. She cried every second of the situation. I tried to calm her but she wouldn’t calm down,” Ritz says.
In the beginning of the war, Alon Sciences Elementary School was used as a base for an Israeli parachuting unit, and many students are still reliving their experience. Nine of them lost close relatives in the Hamas-led attacks, which killed some 1,200 people in Israel, according to the Israeli government.
The Jewish Village of Sderot, Israel, When Israel First invaded on Oct. 7: Emergency Relief for the Palestine-Stokes-Iraq War
The streets were lined with welcome banners. One person says that he’d like to go back to coffee on the balcony. It’s back to mom’s home cooking.
The children were sent back indoors. The Municipality sent a message to school staff explaining that the aid packages were being dropped by planes for the civilians in Gaza.
“All it takes is for a student to see a plane in the sky or hear the sounds of explosions across the border in Gaza to have a panic attack,” says Naama Henig, principal of the Alon Sciences Elementary School in Sderot.
SDEROT, Israel — The biggest Israeli city that Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 almost completely emptied when the war began. Sderot’s 39,000 residents were evacuated to hotels around the country.
