How Israel wiped out a city of 200,000 inhabitants

On the day when the flour finally ran out and the collapsed roof of their two-story house no longer contained the rain, Abdallah Abu Saif’s family gently lifted the 82-year-old grandfather onto a donkey cart and fled Jabalia.

Weak from hunger, deaf from months of airstrikes and vaguely aware that he might never return, Abu Saif asked his youngest grandson to support him. He wanted to see the landmarks of his life one last time: the wedding hall where he had married his four sons; the school where he studied, then taught; the cemetery where his parents are buried.

But on that November day, “there was nothing to see — nothing left, just rubble and rubble,” his son Ibrahim said. “His whole life was erased. Only his memories remain.”

Nowhere in Gaza has been spared the devastating force of the Israeli military and its heavy bombardment since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that started the war, which officials now hope a ceasefire can bring to an end.

But nowhere was it more completely destroyed than Jabalija, a once ancient city that, after the war in 1948, borrowed its name from a nearby refugee camp.

It has grown into one of the largest camps in the Palestinian territory, and about 200,000 people live in Jabalia and its surrounding streets — including more than 100,000 officially registered refugees, according to the UN and local officials.

Its history follows the tragic arc of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, born at the end of one war and destroyed by another – a graveyard of memories unmoored from the landmarks that once held them in place.

No one has ever described Jabalija as beautiful, especially the camp itself. But it was always a busy, vibrant part of Palestinian life: prayers at the Al-Awda Mosque, shawarma protests at the Six Martyrs Roundabout, romances blessed at the nearby Baghdad Wedding Hall.

Shoppers traveled from all over Gaza to the camp’s bustling market, lured by low prices as well as ice creams and cakes from the famous Al-Zatoun shop, in the heart of the Souq.

The famous three-story Al-Qadi “Oriental sweets building”, which sells cakes including the famous pistachio-filled baklava, was another magnet. Locals flocked to his hall for birthday parties, while thousands pre-ordered plates of cake to celebrate their high school exam results.

The Jabalia Service Sports Club was the hub of football-obsessed Gaza, hosting local matches, while the nearby Raba’a Cafe screened matches from the European Champions League to the Egyptian Premier League. Performers sang and played the oud at musical evenings in the cafe.

So relentless was the Israeli attack and so complete the destruction – not only in Jabalia but also in nearby Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun – that a former Israeli defense minister late last year described the army’s actions in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”.

“There is no Beit Hanoun. There is no Beit Lahia. They [the Israeli military] they are currently operating in Jabalia and are basically clearing the area of ​​Arabs,” Moshe Yalon told local TV. Condemned for his comments, he doubled down, telling another interviewer that “it’s ethnic cleansing — there’s no other word for it.”

From the air, the Jabalia refugee camp is now an acre of rubble as far as drones can see, its once-full streets littered with the rubble of tens of thousands of homes. According to local officials, more than 46,000 Palestinians were killed across the Strip.

From the ground it is an unimaginable horror, said Ibrahim al-Kharabishi, a lawyer who refused to leave. During Israeli attacks, he, his wife and four children hide in the corner of their house. He evades Israeli quadcopters in secret forays to get food for survival.

“We see bodies that no one dares to remove as far as the eye can see. We hear the injured calling for help and some of them are dying,” he said. “Whoever feels brave enough to come to their aid falls beside them and then we hear two voices crying for help instead of one.”

The poet Mosab Abu Toha grew up in nearby Beit Lahia. He first fled to Egypt, and then to Syracuse, New York. All he has left to pass on to his children are stories.

His library of several thousand books was destroyed in Israeli airstrikes. “I leave my room door open,” he wrote in the poem, “so the words in my books can escape when they hear the bombs.”

This, he said, is the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee experience since 1948: repeated forced displacements during the conflict, even from temporary homes in refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, all the while hoping to return to ancestral homes in Jaffa, Haifa or Ramle .

They are pushing us further away from our homeland and the memories we should keep, he said. “For us, now that this camp is destroyed, it is also the destruction of the history of refugees that lasted for about 76 years.”

Jabalia plays a large role in the stories of both Israelis and Palestinians. The first intifada, or uprising, erupted from its crowded streets in 1987 after an Israeli truck driver hit and killed three Palestinians from the camp, exposing decades of simmering anger over Israel’s occupation of the strip.

But its dense, chaotic growth from a makeshift camp after the 1948 war to a concrete jungle of no more than two square kilometers has also highlighted an intractable problem at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the right of return for Palestinians who fled their homes. in what eventually became Israel, and generations of their descendants.

By the time Hajj Alyan Fares was born in 1955, the camp had begun to take shape. The UN agency for the Palestinians, UNRWA, built small houses of cement and corrugated iron, with rooms no larger than three square meters. Whole families would crowd into them. Houses had no toilets and residents had to carry water from taps far away.

Now, displaced in the ruins of another camp, Fares, 69, has one dream: If Israel ever withdraws, he will pitch a tent over the ruins of his house and live there until Jabalia is rebuilt.

“Jabalia camp is my town, it’s my hometown. Everything that belongs to me is in Jabalia,” he said, his voice almost drowned out by the Israeli drone. “I would feel strange in any place outside of Jabalia.”

Whether Israel will allow the return of hundreds of thousands of people who have fled northern Gaza has been a key sticking point in the ceasefire talks. Anyone who returned would return to a landscape devastated by IDF incursions, including the current operation, which Israel says is aimed at stopping Hamas from regrouping. More than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in the operation in the north.

The health ministry has so far recorded 2,500 deaths in the northern operation, but with many bodies left to rot in the streets – some even eaten by stray dogs – local officials believe the true toll is twice that. The only medical facility still in operation, an Indonesian hospital, is barely functioning, doctors said.

For more than three months, Israel allowed little food. Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, said on X that between October and the end of December, humanitarian agencies tried 140 times to reach besieged civilians, but had “almost zero access”.

ID denies that it carries out the so-calledthe general’s plan“, proposed by former national security adviser Giora Eiland, which involves depopulating northern Gaza by force and withholding humanitarian aid.

A senior Israeli official said, however, that northern Gaza “will never look the same again.” Many of the Israeli kibbutzim targeted by Hamas in the October 7 attack, which killed 1,200 people according to Israeli officials, were near the north of the Strip.

“You can call it a buffer zone, you can call it agricultural land, you can call it whatever you want, but there will be more [physical] separation between Israeli communities and Palestinian towns.”

Aid workers say there can’t be more than a few thousand people. Some stubbornly refuse to be expelled from their land. Others are too poor or sick to move. Some shuttle between barely functioning hospitals, hoping that their protected status under international law can offer meager security.

Abed Abu Ghassan took refuge in a school near an Indonesian hospital. He heard artillery and explosions all day as Israel’s Corps of Engineers destroyed belt after belt of houses, many of them posting videos online in footage the IDF tried to contain. In some videos, Israeli soldiers laugh, play music and dance as controlled demolitions destroy homes.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and UN experts, have condemned Israel’s destruction of civilian property, saying that unless it serves a clear military purpose, the acts may violate international law.

The Israeli military said its actions in Gaza and Jabalia were “necessary to implement a defense plan that will ensure improved security in southern Israel.”

He said his operations in Jabalia were aimed at eliminating the Hamas brigades in northern Gaza, which were “systematically exploiting civilian centers”.

“The IDF is taking feasible precautions to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure, civilian populations and evacuations in relevant cases,” it said in a statement, claiming its soldiers encountered neighborhoods turned into “combat complexes used for ambushes.”

“It goes without saying that there is no IDF doctrine aimed at inflicting maximum damage on civilian infrastructure,” it said.

Within Jabalija, the terror is magnified by the industrial nature of the destruction. Abu Ghassan said that entire neighborhoods were razed to the ground: Fakhoura, Fallouja and Abu Sharif.

“I stayed despite the hunger,” he said amid the explosions. “We people from the north love it here, but the situation has become catastrophic: hunger, fear and the destruction of every building.”

Ten days after speaking to the FT, his family said, Abu Ghassan was dead: killed in his beloved Beit Lahia in an Israeli airstrike, dying in the ruins of northern Gaza, which he refused to leave.