How did Israel wipe out a town with a population of 200,000 people?

On the day they finally ran out of flour, and the collapsed roof of their two-story home no longer kept out the rain, Abdullah Abu Seif's family gently lifted the 82-year-old grandfather into a donkey cart and fled Jabalia.

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

But on that November day, “there was nothing to see, nothing left, just ruins and ruins,” his son Ibrahim said. “His entire life has been erased. All that's left are his memories.”

No place in Gaza has been spared the destructive power of the Israeli army and its violent bombardment since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that led to the outbreak of war. The mediators believe they are close to reaching a ceasefire agreement to end the fighting and secure the release of Israeli hostages held in the Strip.

But no place has been more completely destroyed than Jabalia, once an ancient city that gave its name after the 1948 war to the nearby refugee camp.

The camp has developed into one of the largest in the Palestinian territories, with an estimated 200,000 people living in Jabalia and the surrounding streets – including more than 100,000 officially registered refugees, according to local officials and the United Nations.

Its history traces the tragic arc of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, born at one end of one war and destroyed in another — a graveyard of memories separated from the monuments that once held them in place.

No one described Jabalia as beautiful, especially the camp itself. But it was always a lively, lively slice of Palestinian life: prayers at Al Awda Mosque, protests with a side of shawarma at the Six Martyrs Roundabout, and blissful romances at a nearby Baghdad wedding hall.

Shoppers from across Gaza traveled to the crowded camp market, attracted by its cheap prices as well as ice cream and cakes from the famous Al-Zitoun shop in the heart of the market.

The three-storey Al-Qadi Oriental Sweets building, which sells pastries including the famous pistachio-stuffed baklava, was another attraction. Locals gather to hold birthday parties in its hall, while thousands of people pre-order pastry dishes to celebrate their high school exam results.

Jabalia Sports Club was the hub of football-mad Gaza City, hosting local matches while the adjacent Rabaa Café showed matches ranging from the Champions League to the Egyptian Premier League. The musicians sang and played the oud during the musical evenings held by the café.

The Israeli offensive has been relentless, and the destruction so extensive — not only in Jabalia but also in neighboring 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 army) are currently operating in Jabalia, and they are basically cleansing the area of ​​Arabs,” Moshe Yaalon told local television. After being condemned for his comments, he stressed his position, telling another interviewer : “It is ethnic cleansing – there is no other word to describe it.”

The IDF denies this, saying it is focused on destroying Hamas. The army said: “It is self-evident that there is no IDF doctrine that aims to inflict the greatest amount of damage to civilian infrastructure.”

From the air, Jabalia refugee camp is now acres of rubble as far as drones can see, its once-bustling streets buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of homes. Across the Strip, more than 46,000 Palestinians were killed, according to local officials.

Ibrahim Al-Kharabishi, the lawyer who refused to leave, said that from the ground it was an unimaginable horror. During Israeli raids, he, his wife, and his four children hide in the corner of their house. He evades Israeli quadcopters in hidden forays to obtain food to survive.

“We see corpses that no one dares to remove as far as the eye can see. We hear the wounded screaming for help, and some of them are dying.” “Whoever feels brave enough to go to their rescue falls beside them and then we hear two voices calling for help instead of one.”

Poet Musab Abu Toha grew up in nearby Beit Lahia. He fled first to Egypt, then to Syracuse, New York. All that remains for him to pass on to his children are stories.

Israeli air strikes destroyed his library, which included several thousand books. “I leave my room door open, so the words in my books can escape when they hear the bombs,” he wrote in a poem.

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 while clinging to the hope of returning to ancestral homes in Jaffa, Haifa or Ramla. .

“We are being pushed further and further away from our homeland and the memories we should preserve,” he said. “For us, now that this camp has been destroyed, this is also the destruction of the refugee history that has lasted for about 76 years.”

Jabalia occupies a large place in the stories of Israelis and Palestinians. The First Intifada erupted from its crowded alleys in 1987 after an Israeli truck driver ran over and killed three Palestinians from the camp, ending decades of intense anger toward the Israeli occupation of the Strip.

But its dense and chaotic growth from a makeshift camp after the 1948 war into a concrete jungle measuring just two square kilometers also highlights 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 for generations of their descendants. .

By the time Hajj Alian Fares was born in 1955, the camp had begun to take shape. The United Nations agency for Palestinian affairs, UNRWA, built small houses made of cement and corrugated iron, with rooms no larger than three square metres. Entire families will gather in it. The homes did not have toilets and residents had to carry water from distant taps.

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

“Jabalia camp is my city, it is my birthplace. Everything that belongs to me is in Jabalia,” he said, his voice almost drowned out by an Israeli drone. “I feel strange anywhere outside Jabalia.”

Whether or not Israel will allow hundreds of thousands of people who fled northern Gaza to return has been a crucial hurdle in the ceasefire negotiations. Anyone who returns will return to a landscape torn apart by Israeli military incursions, including the current operation, which Israel says is aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping. More than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in the northern operation.

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

Israel has allowed little food entry for more than three months. Between October and the end of December, aid agencies made 140 attempts to reach trapped civilians, but had “almost no access,” UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told X. .

The Israeli army denies carrying out the so-called “Generals plan“, proposed by former National Security Advisor Giora Eiland, would involve forcefully evacuating northern Gaza and denying humanitarian aid.

However, a senior Israeli official said that northern Gaza “will never be the same again.” Many of the Israeli kibbutzim targeted by Hamas in the October 7 attack, which according to Israeli officials killed 1,200 people, were close to the northern Gaza 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 cities,” the official said.

Aid workers say there can be no more than a few thousand people left. Some stubbornly refuse to be expelled from their lands. Others are so poor or sick that they cannot move. Some move between barely functioning hospitals, hoping that their protected status under international law will provide them with a modicum of safety.

Abed Abu Ghassan was taking shelter in a school near the Indonesian hospital. All day long he could hear the sounds of artillery shelling and explosions as Israeli engineering teams destroyed belt after belt of homes, many of them posting videos online of footage the Israeli military tried to suppress. In some videos, Israeli soldiers laugh, play music and dance as they are under control. Demolitions destroy homes.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and UN experts, have denounced Israel's destruction of civilian property, saying that unless it serves a clear military purpose, such actions may violate international law.

The Israeli army said that its movements in Gaza and Jabalia were “necessary in order to implement a defensive plan that would provide better security in southern Israel.”

It said that its operations in Jabalia focused on eliminating Hamas brigades in northern Gaza, which were “systematically exploiting civilian centers.”

“The IDF is taking possible precautions to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure, the civilian population and evacuations in relevant cases,” the statement said, claiming that its forces encountered neighborhoods that had been converted into “combat complexes used for ambushes.”

From within Jabalia, the horror is exacerbated by the industrial nature of the destruction. Abu Ghassan said that entire neighborhoods were razed to the ground: Al-Fakhoura, Al-Fallujah, and Abu Sharif.

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

Ten days after speaking to the Financial Times, his family said Abu Ghassan was dead: killed in his beloved Beit Lahia in an Israeli airstrike, and dead in the rubble of northern Gaza he refused to give up.