Gazans return to devastated Khan Younis as Israeli troops pull back
Residents find large parts of the city reduced to rubble after months of fighting between Israeli troops and terror operatives the IDF says were embedded in residential areas
Residents of the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis began returning to the city Sunday as Israel announced that its troops were pulling out after months of intense fighting there, finding a devastated landscape of bombed-out homes and rubble-strewn streets.
“It smells like death,” said Maha Thaer, a mother of four, as she returned to the city on Sunday. “We don’t have a city anymore — only rubble. There is absolutely nothing left. I could not stop myself crying as I walked through the streets.”
“All the streets have been bulldozed. And the smell… I watched people digging and bringing out the bodies,” said Thaer, 38, whose home was partially destroyed.
Nearly 400,000 people lived in Khan Younis and its environs before October 7. Much of the area is now in ruins after months of bombardment and heavy fighting between Israeli troops and fighters from Palestinian terror groups.
A straggle of men and boys riding donkey carts, bicycles, and the odd pickup truck headed north out of Rafah in the far south of the Gaza Strip, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians have taken refuge from air strikes and fighting on the ground.
They passed the burned-out shell of the Al-Salam hospital, with almost all of the buildings around it razed to the ground.
Thaer, from the upmarket Hamad Town residential complex in the west of Khan Younis, said she was “very shocked and sad” at the state of her home.
“There were no walls or windows. Most of the towers were completely blown up,” she said.
Troops spent 10 days going from building to building in the vast project where the Israeli military said the Hamas terror group had built up infrastructure, capturing some 300 terror suspects, killing around 100 gunmen and uncovering multiple weapons caches, including the gun of a brigade commander killed on October 7.
The Israel Defense Forces maintains that Hamas, which rules the Strip, purposely situated military assets within residential areas and is therefore to blame for the high level of destruction in the crowded enclave.
Thaer said she would move back into her badly damaged apartment, “even though it is not suitable for living, but it is better than tents.”
Her neighbors suffered a greater misfortune. “They found their homes destroyed and they don’t know where they will go,” she said.
Other Gazans carried a mattress on their heads in the hope they would still have four walls to put it in.
One of those who left Rafah on Sunday climbed on the top of a heap of rubble in Khan Younis which once had been a home.
With everything around him in ruins, AFP photographs showed the man standing among smashed concrete and corrugated iron roofing.
Not a single structure within sight appeared untouched by the war.
While some photos showed large swathes of the city flattened, other pictures showed evidence of efforts to avoid damaging critical infrastructure.
One picture showed a water-pumping facility seemingly unharmed amid the rubble. In the background could be seen a UN school, used to shelter displaced Gazans, which appeared to have been largely spared.
The Israeli army told AFP that it had pulled its 98th division of ground troops out of the southern city on Sunday to “recuperate,” with one official telling the Israeli media it had killed thousands of Hamas terrorists there.
“There’s no need for us to remain… We did everything we could there,” an army official told Haaretz newspaper.
The Israel-Hamas war erupted with Palestinian terror group Hamas carrying out an unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 253 hostages, some half of whom are still held.
Since the start of the war, more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. These figures can not be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed more than 13,000 gunmen in Gaza and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. Some 250 IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
The Times of Israel Community.