The destruction in the city of Khan Younis: a tribute to Israel and to the world in the aftermath of the September 11 Gaza massacre
Anas Baba reported from Khan Younis. Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv. Abu Bakr Bashir was reporting from London. Jawad Rizkallah contributed to this story from Beirut.
The mother cries as she explains that the palm tree was torn out. Where are you, my dear, Mohammad? I’ve come for you, my dear.”
She’s back to find the trees uprooted. She fears that her son’s body was dug up. During the war, Israeli troops looked for the remains of captives and sent the bodies of Palestinians to Gaza. Over the weekend, Israel said it retrieved the body of one civilian captive in the city.
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 hospital in the city is no longer open. Israeli soldiers scrawled writing on the walls of the hospital rooms. The writing might have been to inform other soldiers 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, our houses have been destroyed, and we have been destroyed by the world,” sings Irbaya as he walks his bicycle along the street.
Many Palestinians returned to the city to gather their belongings, fearing 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.”
Israel pulled out of the city on Sunday after a four-month battle with Hamas. The Palestinians are going to discover a completely destroyed city.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel dismantled the military unit of Hamas. Most of the Israeli ground troops in Gaza have been removed with the withdrawal.
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Umm Ahmad Il-Sibaee stands silently with her purse among gray hills of cement. One of the few buildings left in the area 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.
The man picked up the toddler from the daycare. She went back to the city with her family. She says the wall and soldier protecting the daycare still do not give her a sense of security.
The mayor officially reopened Sderot and its schools on March 3. Families coming back to the city were drawn by the reopening of schools and the difficulties of living in a hotel for so long. Those who come back are also receiving grants from the government to support them as they re-acclimate.
Jerusalemis are returning to Sderot, the biggest city attacked by Hamas: a viewfinder of a devastated neighborhood in the southern hemisphere
“It’s a mix of sadness and happiness,” Chen says, looking into Gaza. “We are winning the war against them, but you never know what’s going to come afterwards — if it’s going to be an even more extreme group.”
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 is a hilltop where you can pay a bit more than a dollar and look through a viewfinder for a closer look across the border to north Gaza: destroyed homes and piles of rubble close to the border region. Further in the distance, a large plume of smoke rises.
“We cannot give them [the] option to come back to their home. “After we’ve finished with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, we’re able to have a discussion about that,” Davidi said, referring to militant groups in Gaza. “And if we need, and the world wants, to build a new neighborhood in Gaza, so do it very, very far away from us.”
“If they have the chance, they will kill everyone here,” he says. The flag of Israel showed them that we are here, even if you think that you can break us.
The mayor talked about it while visiting north Gaza with Israeli troops. He planted his city’s flag in the destroyed central square of Gaza City.
What happened to a fourth-grade student: What was trauma? When Israel came back to Sderot, Israel, the biggest city attacked by Hamas
One recent morning, a teacher asked her fourth-grade class: “What is trauma?” The kids say: “Anxiety.” “Something bad that happened to us.” Something you do not want to remember.
Psychologists taught the teachers coping strategies to help their students, like calming breathing exercises. They tell students they can go under their desks for a safe space when they feel panicked.
Her classmate, Oriya Dahan, 11, says when the gunfire started that day, her mom sent her to close the windows, from where she saw the Hamas pickup trucks driving in. Then Israeli soldiers took up a position on their balcony.
Rakefet Ritz said that when the war began she and her mother didn’t leave the safe room for two days. She took on the role of comforting her mother. “Every second she cried, because of the situation. I tried to calm her but she wouldn’t calm down,” Ritz says.
Alon Sciences Elementary School, which had been used as a base for an Israeli paratrooper unit in the first months of the war, welcomed back students who are still reliving their Oct. 7 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.
Source: Israelis are returning to Sderot, the biggest city attacked by Hamas
Gazans rife with terror: the most populous Israeli city in the war-torn region of the 1967 Gaza-Israel War
The city lined the streets with welcome banners. One said that they should go back to coffee on the balcony. “Go to mom’s home cooking.”
The children were sent back indoors. The text message explained that the school staff had just seen aid being dropped in Gaza, not paragliding Hamas attackers.
“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.
The biggest Israeli city that was attacked by Hamas was almost completely emptied after the war began. Most of Sderot’s 39,000 residents were evacuated to hotels across the country.