Palestinians are returning home to find flattened neighbourhoods- forcing them to erect makeshift tents on the rubble and search through the debris for scraps of clothing and blankets as wintry conditions begin to set in. In Gaza City, bulldozers have begun clearing the rubble, but it is a drop in the ocean. The equipment they are using is decrepit.
Ali al-Attar, a bulldozer operator told Al Jazeera that the scale of the devastation is “beyond imagination”.
“Just opening the roads alone will take at least a month, just so people can access the area,” he said. “The bulldozers are in poor condition. The one I’m using is leaking oil and needs major repairs. To be honest, we need 20 times the number of bulldozers we have got”.
Latest UN satellite imagery shows that 41,000 housing units have been flattened in Gaza City alone- translating into over 8m cubic metres of rubble.
In Khan Younis, residents spoke to Anadolu Agency, describing devastation akin to a “tsunami or a 10-magnitude earthquake”.
63-year-old Abdel Malek Al-Farra told Anadolu as he sifted through the wreckage of a four-storey apartment block that he had spent his life in, that “we came back hoping to find a shelter, but everything is rubble—even the empty plots of land are devastated”.
“Where do we live? Where do we go? If we head to the sea, we’ll drown if the waves rise. We’ll drown inside the tents once the rains start, as tents don’t protect us,” he said.
Withdrawing Israeli forces left fragments of explosives and booby-trapped vehicles in their wake. The few remaining structures bear traces of racist graffiti left by soldiers.
