Israel and Hamas at war | Khan Younes disfigured

(Khan Younes) The hope of finding her home carried Aisha al-Hour to Khan Younes after the withdrawal of Israeli troops. But it took time for the Palestinian woman to find her exact location in this ruined town in the southern Gaza Strip.

“My house was completely destroyed and is nothing more than rubble,” confided this 26-year-old resident met by AFP, “with her heart eaten away by pain” after losing her home.

“In every corner of my house, there were memories […] The scale of the devastation is indescribable,” she said.

On Monday, thousands of residents of Khan Yunis who had found refuge on the borders of the narrow Gaza Strip discovered the apocalyptic landscape left by months of fierce fighting between Israeli troops and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.

Israel spoke of a tactical withdrawal from this city on Sunday, allowing soldiers to prepare “the continuation of their missions […] in the Rafah area”, on the border with Egypt.

This respite pushed the displaced on foot, by car or on carts pulled by donkeys, along disfigured streets, lined with gutted facades, open to the four winds. The piles of rubble and the collapsed sections of concrete release dust which makes the atmosphere even more ghostly.

“Tragedy”

“It’s as if we don’t recognize the places, because nothing looks like what was there before,” describes Salim Sharab, 37, a resident of this town which had 400,000 inhabitants before the war.

He is still on his way to his house and does not know what is left of it. “I’m on my way to check,” he said, assuring: “even if the house is destroyed, I will pitch a tent on the rubble.”

Safaa Qandil, 46, is already feeling her disillusionment: “we were hoping to find the house or what was left of it or simply to recover something”.

“But we didn’t find the house,” she says, still in shock.

On the way home, she said she saw “all the houses destroyed.” “Nothing was spared,” she adds, referring to a state of ruin “that words cannot describe.”

Her grief is deeper: her son and his pregnant wife were killed by the Israeli army, she says.

“My tragedy is immense,” said Safaa Qandil, adding that her daughter-in-law’s “father, brother, sister, aunt and the rest of the family” were also killed.

“It’s indescribable,” she adds. “In every house there is a martyr, a wounded person […] We cried like crazy at the sight of the blood.”

The city’s civil defense appealed to the United Nations on Monday for equipment to excavate the bodies, most of which it said were in an advanced state of decomposition.

For six months, the conflict has cost the lives of more than 33,000 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, and the majority of the 2.4 million inhabitants are threatened with famine according to the UN. .

The unprecedented attack carried out by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, the majority civilians, according to a report established by AFP based on official Israeli figures.