In Gaza, Assessing Destruction On An Unimaginable Scale

Over 80 Palestinians have been killed across Gaza since the ceasefire took hold, 49 of them in Rafah alone.

By Abubaker Abed, Drop Site

On the morning of January 19, Khalil Fahjan left his family’s small, damp tent in Deir al-Balah and quickly headed south to his family home in Rafah. The deadline for a “ceasefire” agreement to halt Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, at least temporarily, was supposed to go into effect at 8:30 a.m. that morning. He had not been to Rafah in more than seven months, since the Israeli military invaded the city, and he was desperate to go home.

Fahjan, 25, was unaware that the Israeli military had delayed the implementation of the deal by nearly three hours, attacking and killing Palestinians in Khan Younis and northern Gaza in the interim.

When he arrived in his neighborhood of Tal-al-Sultan, he struggled to comprehend the scene before him. “It was such utter devastation that I could see the sea from central Rafah, which is four kilometers away,” Fahjan told Drop Site News. “All the houses in my area were turned into piles of rubble. At first glance, I couldn’t identify my neighborhood or my home. Every landmark that I had once known was erased. It is now a city of ghosts.”

He described walking through an open graveyard, watching people collecting decomposing body parts and human remains in an effort to identify their loved ones amid unexploded munitions on the streets and inside buildings.

When he reached his home, it was barely standing. The interior was burnt out and charred, and the walls were crumbling and riddled with bullet holes. “My house, where all my memories, my work, my dreams, my certificate—where my entire life was—had simply vanished,” he said. “This war has stolen everything from us. I look at Rafah and ask myself whether or not I will stay in a tent for the next two or three years. The city needs 10 to 20 years to get back to a sense of what it was before.”