Palestinians return to Gaza City to find their homes reduced to rubble

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(29 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gaza City, Gaza Strip - 28 January 2025
1. Various of displaced people sitting near their destroyed homes
2. Various of men outside tent placed next to a destroyed building
3. Palestinians walk along road in front of destroyed buildings
4. Various of people standing and sitting outside a self-made structure
5. Various of a man sitting down while observing destruction around him
6. Various of people setting up a tent near the rubble of their house
4. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Nader Shamalakh, homeless Gaza City resident:
"I swear that when I arrived here, I did not realise it. I only knew my home from the transmission tower. I was lost, lost. There were no landmarks left in the whole city."
5. Various of Shamalakh walking among rubble of his home
6. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Nader Shamalakh, homeless Gaza City resident:
"We came walking with suffering that only God knows, I came expecting to find here a room, anything to settle in, but as you can see, thank God, this is my house, five floors where 50 people live, thank God."
7. Various of people walking among the rubble of destroyed buildings
8. Various of a family setting up a tent near their destroyed home
9. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Reyad Ramadan, homeless Gaza City resident:
"If all the houses were destroyed, I would not care, but what is important to me is my son. May God have mercy on him. He was martyred, and I had another martyr before that. This is the second martyr."
10. Various of people looking for their belongings among the rubble
11. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Reyad Ramadan, homeless Gaza City resident:
"I swear that there is nothing visible, nothing is visible, and there are no landmarks. The cupboard has no traces. There are no traces. My cupboard contains all the documents. We went out during the bombing. They hit the houses next to us, two... three houses. We said that now is our turn."
12. Various of family sitting next to a fire outside of their tent among the ruins of their home
13. Various of people walking through destroyed streets
14. Various of woman sweeping rubble and dust from her apartment
15. Various of destruction
STORYLINE:
Nader Shamalakh had seen and heard Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza City — that’s what sent him and his family fleeing south. But nothing could have prepared him for the terror of returning to a hometown he no longer recognized.

It wasn’t just bombed-out buildings that Palestinians in this besieged territory have rebuilt again and again after the various rounds of war between Israel and Hamas since the militant group seized control of the enclave in 2007.

This time, following intense Israeli airstrikes and the army’s demolition of scores of booby-trapped buildings, Gaza City had become a landscape of near-apocalyptic destruction.

It was possible to make out where houses once stood only by keeping an eye out for piles of cement strewn with belongings.

"I swear that when I arrived here I did not realize it,” said Shamalakh, one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who made the exhausting trek home to northern Gaza.

Most of them had fled nearly 16 months ago and, barred by Israel from returning, were forced to live in flimsy tents further south as Israel pursued its military campaign against Hamas.

Now, after Israel and Hamas resolved a last-minute dispute, the Israeli military finally withdrew from Gaza’s coastal road on Monday morning, allowing displaced families to head north on foot.

Cars were also able to make their way north subject to security inspections.











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