How Israel destroyed the city of 200,000

Finally, when the powder ran out and the roof of their two-story house in a cave failed to keep out the rain, Abdullah Abu Sayf’s family gently lifted the 82-year-old grandfather onto a donkey cart and fled Jabalia.

Weakened by hunger, deafened by months of airstrikes, and knowing he would never return, Abusef asked to raise his young grandson. He wanted to see the symbols of his life for the last time: the wedding hall where he married four sons; the school where he attended and then taught; The grave where his parents are buried.

But on that November day, “there was nothing to see – nothing left, only rubble and rubble”, said his son Ibrahim. “His whole life was erased. All that remains is his memory.”

In the year Israeli forces and heavy bombardment have left Gaza unscathed since an October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that sparked the war, which officials now hope may end a cease-fire.

But nowhere is it more completely shattered than Jabalia, the ancient city that gave its name to the nearby refugee camp after the 1948 war.

Jabalia and its surrounding streets have grown into one of the largest camps in the Palestinian territories, home to an estimated 200,000 people, including more than 100,000 officially registered refugees, UN and local officials said.

The story traces the tragic arc of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—born at the end of one war and destroyed by another—remembering the historical symbols it once held.

No one has described Jabaliya, especially the camp, as beautiful. But there was always a buzzing, vibrant slice of Palestinian life: prayers at Al-Awda Mosque, protests alongside shawarma in Six Martyrs Square, blessed love stories at a nearby Baghdad wedding hall.

Shoppers travel from all over Gaza to the camp’s busy market, attracted by the cheap prices as well as ice cream and cakes from the popular Al-Zatoun shop in the heart of the mall.

Another magnet was the three-story Al Qadi “Oriental Sweets Building,” selling pastries including the famous pistachio-crusted baklava. Local residents gather at the hall for a birthday party, and thousands of people pre-order pastries to celebrate their high school exam results.

The Jabalia Service Sports Club was the center of football-obsessed Gaza, hosting local matches while the nearby Rabaa Cafe showed matches from the European Champions League to the Egyptian Premier League. At the cafe’s musical evenings, the musicians sang and played the oud.

Israel’s offensive is unrelenting, and will result in destruction – not only in Jabalia, but also in nearby Beit Lahia and Beit Hanon – as a former Israeli defense minister late last year described military operations in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”.

“Beth Hannon is gone. There is no house. They (Israeli troops) are currently operating in Jabalia, and basically, they are clearing the Arab area,” Moshe Ya’alon told local TV. Condemned for his comments, he doubled down on the interviewer a second time, saying, “It’s racial cleansing – there’s no other word for it.”

From the air, as far as drones can see, the Jabaliya refugee camp is now acres of rubble, the streets that once filled it buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of homes. More than 46,000 Palestinians were killed, according to local officials.

“It’s unimaginable horror from the ground up,” said lawyer Ibrahim al-Karabishi, who refused to leave. During the Israeli occupation, he, his wife and four children hid in the corner of their house. Flee Israeli quadcopters across battlefields to find food to survive.

“We see bodies that no one dares to remove until they see them. We hear the cries of the wounded for help, some of them dead. “Anyone who feels brave enough to go to their aid falls beside them, and we hear not one but two voices crying for help.”

The poet Mosab Abu Toha grew up in nearby Beit Lahia. He fled first to Egypt, then to Syracuse, New York. All that is left to pass on to his children is the tale.

The library, which contained thousands of books, was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. “I leave my room door open, so the words in my books run away when they hear the bomb,” he wrote in a poem.

This has been the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee experience since 1948: repeated forced displacements during the conflict, even from temporary housing in refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, all while despairing of returning to ancestral homes in Jaffa, Haifa or Ramle. .

“We are being pushed away from our homeland and the memories we have to protect,” he said. “For us, the destruction of this camp now marks the destruction of 76 years of refugee history.”

Jabalia occupies an important place in both Israeli and Palestinian history. The first intifada, or uprising, in 1987, after an Israeli truck driver ran over and killed three Palestinians in the camp, has not let up its anger over decades of Israeli occupation.

But the dense and chaotic growth, which has grown from a makeshift camp after the 1948 war to a concrete jungle of no more than 2 square kilometers, has highlighted a central issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the right of return for displaced Palestinians to what eventually became Israel and their descendants.

The camp began to take shape in 1955 when Haj Alian Fares was born. UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinians, has built small cement and tin houses with rooms no larger than three square meters. All the families would flock to them. The houses had no toilets and the residents had to fetch tap water from far away.

Now, displaced to the ruins of another camp, Fares, 69, has one dream: If Israel ever leaves, he will pitch a tent on the ruins of his home until Yabalya is built.

“Jabalia camp is my town, my hometown. “Everything that belongs to me is in Jabalia,” he said, his voice nearly drowned out by an Israeli drone. “Anywhere outside of Jabaliya, I feel strange.”

Whether or not Israel will allow the return of hundreds of thousands of people who have fled northern Gaza has remained a critical stumbling block in cease-fire negotiations. Anyone who returns will return to a landscape shattered by the IDF’s occupation, including the current operation, which Israel aims to halt the consolidation of Hamas. More than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in the northern attack.

The Ministry of Health has recorded 2,500 deaths so far in the northern operation, but with so many corpses left to rot in the streets – some eaten by stray dogs – local officials believe the true toll is double that. The only medical facility still in commission, the Indonesian Hospital, is barely functioning, doctors said.

For more than three months, Israel has allowed little food to enter. United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said on X that aid agencies made 140 attempts to reach the besieged civilians from October to the end of December, but access was almost zero. .

The Defense Force denies that it is “implementing the so-called.”The plan of the generals”, by former National Security Adviser Jorah Eiland, who proposed destabilizing northern Gaza and denying humanitarian aid.

But a senior Israeli official said northern Gaza “will never look the same again.” Most of the Israeli kibbutzim targeted by Hamas on October 7 were close to the north, which Israeli officials said killed 1,200 people.

“You can call it buffer zone, you can call it agricultural land, you can call it whatever you want, but there will be a greater (physical) separation between Israeli communities and Palestinian cities.”

Aid workers say there are unlikely to be more than a few thousand people left. Some stubbornly resist being kicked off their land. Others are too poor or sick to move. They scramble among some dysfunctional hospitals, hoping that their status as protected under international law might provide them with some measure of security.

Abed Abu Ghassan was sheltered in a school near an Indonesian hospital. Throughout the day, Israel’s engineering corps heard artillery fire and explosions as it destroyed belt after belt of homes, many of which posted videos online showing the IDF trying to take control. Demolishing houses.

Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and UN experts, have protested Israel’s destruction of civilian property, saying that unless it has a clear military purpose, it may violate international law.

He said the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and Jabaliya were necessary to “implement a defense plan that will ensure improved security in southern Israel.”

He said Jabalia’s operations were focused on eliminating Hamas’ northern Gaza brigades, which were “systematically exploiting civilian centers.”

Adequate precautions will be taken to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure, casualties and displacement of civilian populations, the statement said, adding that the troops encountered settlements that had been turned into “combat structures”.

“It cannot be said that there is no IDF doctrine aimed at inflicting significant damage on civilian infrastructure,” he said.

From Jabaliya, the terror is increasing due to the industrial nature of the destruction. According to Abu Ghassan, all the settlements in Fakhura, Fallujah and Abu Sharif were sorted.

“Despite the hunger, I stayed,” he said between bursts. We northerners celebrate here, but the situation has become dire: hunger, fear and the destruction of every building.

Ten days after he spoke to the FT, his family said Abu Ghassan was dead: killed by an Israeli airstrike in his beloved home in Lahia, he died in the rubble of northern Gaza, refusing to leave.