Palestinians face a landscape of destruction in the ‘ghost towns’ of Gaza

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians in Gaza are clashing an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after the cease-fire suspended more than 15 months of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

Across the tiny coastal enclave, where refugee camps have been built interspersed between towns, footage taken by an Associated Press drone shows mounds of rubble stretching away. as far as the eye can see — the remnants of the longest and deadliest war between Israel and Hamas in their bloody history.

“As you can see, it has become a ghost town,” said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose home in the southern city of Rafah was destroyed. “There’s nothing,” he said, sitting and drinking coffee in a brown chair nestled in the ruins of his three-story home, in a surreal scene.

Critics say Israel has waged a scorched-earth campaign to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza, charges that are being tried in two international courts, including the crime of genocide. Israel denies the allegations and says its military is fighting an uphill battle in densely populated urban areas and that it is trying to avoid causing excessive harm to civilians and their infrastructure.

Military experts say the reality is complex.

“For a campaign of this length, which is a year of fighting in a densely populated environment, where you have an adversary hiding in the midst of that environment, you would expect an extremely high level of damage,” said Matthew Saville, director of military science at the Royal Joint Services Institute. , a British think tank.

Saville said it was difficult to draw a general conclusion about the nature of Israel’s campaign. That, he said, would require evaluating each strike and operation to determine whether they followed the laws of armed conflict and whether they were all proportionate, but he didn’t think the scorched-earth description was accurate.

International human rights groups. including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, see the massive destruction as part of a wider plan of extermination and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel denies. The groups dispute Israel’s position that the destruction was the result of military activity.

Human Rights Watch, in a November report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, said “the destruction is so extensive that it indicates an intention to permanently resettle many people.”

From a fierce air campaign in the first weeks of the war to a ground invasion that sent thousands of soldiers in tanks, Israel’s response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 resulted in the destruction of much of the civilian infrastructure. the Gaza Strip, displacing 90% of its population. The bright color of pre-war life has disappeared into the monotonous cement gray that dominates the territory. It could take decades if not morerebuild

Airstrikes throughout the war destroyed buildings and other structures said to be harboring militants. But the destruction was compounded by ground forces fighting Hamas fighters in close combat in densely populated areas.

If militants are spotted firing from a residential building near a troop maneuver, forces may raze the entire building to contain the threat. Tank tracks chewed up asphalt roads, leaving behind dusty areas of land.

The Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with using bulldozers to clear routes, demolish buildings perceived as threats, and blow up Hamas’ network of underground tunnels.

Experts say tunnel neutralization operations have been extremely destructive to ground infrastructure. For example, if Israeli forces blow up a 1.5 kilometer (1 mile) long tunnel, it will not spare the houses and buildings above, said Michael Milstein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer.

“If (the tunnel) goes under the urban area, it will all be destroyed,” he said. “There is no other way to destroy the tunnel.”

According to him, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, etc. were shelled and destroyed because Hamas used them for military purposes. Secondary detonations of Hamas explosives inside these buildings could add to the damage.

The way Israel repeatedly returned to areas it said was under its control, only for militants to recapture them, added to the destruction, Saville said.

This is especially noticeable in northern Gazawhere in early October Israel launched a new campaign that nearly destroyed Jabalia, a built-up urban refugee camp. Jabalia is home to descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee during the war that led to the creation of Israel in 1948. Milstein said Israel’s dismantling of the tunnel network was also to blame for the destruction there.

But the destruction was caused not only by strikes on targets. Israel has also designated a buffer zone about a kilometer inside Gaza from the border with Israel, as well as within the Netzarim Corridor, which divides the north of Gaza from the south, and along the Philadelphia Corridor, a strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Significant massifs in these areas were leveled.

Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said the buffer zones were an operational necessity to set aside safe areas of land for Israeli forces. He denied that Israel had indiscriminately cleared civilian areas.

The destruction, as well as the civilian death toll in Gaza, have prompted accusations that Israel has committed war crimes, which it denies. The decisions made by the military in choosing what to drop and why is an important factor in this debate.

“Once the militants get into the building and start using it to fire, you start calculating whether you can hit,” Saville said. The destruction of the building, he said, “is still necessary.”

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Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.