By Jared Malsin and Saeed Shah/Wall Street Journal
Gaza, December 29: The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.
By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.
Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.
Israel says that the bombing campaign and ground offensive has inflicted thousands of casualties on its intended target, Hamas. That U.S.-designated terrorist group’s cross-border assault on Oct. 7 killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials. The attackers tortured residents and burned homes as they went.
In Israel’s response, its bombs, artillery shells and soldiers have killed more than 21,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza. The figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and militants. Most of them are women and children, those officials said.
The destruction resembles that left by Allied bombing of German cities during World War II. “The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a history of aerial bombing. “What you’re seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history.”
Three months ago, Gaza was a vibrant place. Despite decades of Israeli occupation, sieges and wars, many Palestinians enjoyed living there beside the Mediterranean Sea, where they gathered in cafes and seaside restaurants. Families played on the beach. Young men crowded around TVs in the evening to watch soccer.
Today, Gaza is a landscape of crumpled concrete. In northern Gaza, the focus of Israel’s initial offensive, the few people who remain navigate rubble-strewn streets past bombed-out shops and apartment blocks. Broken glass crunches underfoot. Israeli drones buzz overhead.
In the south, where more than a million displaced residents have fled, Gazans sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook. Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military said it is targeting Hamas and taking steps to avoid killing civilians, including by encouraging residents to leave areas it is attacking. The Israeli air force has said its bombing campaign is causing “maximum damage.” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in October that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Israel has accused Hamas of using civilian buildings to hide entrances to tunnels in which it stores weapons and hides commanders. “When you ask why civilian infrastructure is being damaged in Gaza, look at where Hamas built its military infrastructure, then point your finger at Hamas,” Eylon Levy, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said on Dec. 17 on X, formerly Twitter. The U.S. recently pressed Israel to try to limit the number of civilian casualties.
With the war zone mostly closed to the outside world, experts are surveying damage by analyzing satellite imagery and using remote sensing, which monitors physical characteristics by measuring reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. Their findings, they said, are initial and will need verification on the ground, but are likely an underestimate.
According to analysis of satellite data by remote-sensing experts at the City University of New York and Oregon State University, as many as 80% of the buildings in northern Gaza, where the bombing has been most severe, are damaged or destroyed, a higher percentage than in Dresden.
He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University in Ohio, estimated that 20% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed. Winter wheat that should be sprouting around now isn’t visible, he said, suggesting it wasn’t planted.
A World Bank analysis concluded that by Dec. 12, the war had damaged or destroyed 77% of health facilities, 72% of municipal services such as parks, courts and libraries, 68% of telecommunications infrastructure, and 76% of commercial sites, including the almost complete destruction of the industrial zone in the north. More than half of all roads, the World Bank found, have been damaged or destroyed. Some 342 schools have been damaged, according to the U.N., including 70 of its own schools.
An assessment by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that Israel dropped 29,000 weapons on Gaza in a little over two months, according to U.S. officials. By comparison, the U.S. military dropped 3,678 munitions on Iraq from 2004 to 2010, according to the U.S. Central Command. Among the weapons provided by the U.S. to Israel during the Gaza war are 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs designed to penetrate concrete shelters, which military analysts said are usually used to hit military targets in more sparsely populated areas.
Gaza has a rich 4,000-year history. It was a Canaanite and Pharaonic port city that served as a waypoint on trade routes between Africa and Asia. Through history, it built back from wars, sieges, plagues and earthquakes. In 332 B.C., it was the last city to resist Alexander the Great’s march to Egypt—an act of defiance that fueled a mythology of a people who would never bow. The municipality of Gaza’s symbol is a phoenix.
The majority of Gaza’s residents are either refugees themselves or descendants of those who fled land that is now the state of Israel.
Israel seized the Gaza Strip from Egypt in 1967. In 2005, a year after another Israeli military operation against Hamas in Gaza, it withdrew its remaining soldiers and settlements, although it maintained control over the enclave’s borders, coastline and airspace. Israel and Egypt severely restricted movement in and out of Gaza in 2007 after Hamas took control of it, ending decades in which many Gazans worked inside Israel and learned Hebrew.
The current war hasn’t spared treasured historic sites. The Great Omari Mosque, an ancient building that was converted from a fifth-century church to a Muslim place of worship, has been destroyed, its minaret toppled. An Israeli airstrike in October hit the fifth century Church of Saint Porphyrius, killing at least 16 Palestinians sheltering there.
“The loss of the Omari mosque saddens me more than the destruction of my own house,” said Fadel Alatel, an archaeologist from Gaza who fled his home to shelter in the southern end of the strip.
The exclusive Rimal neighborhood, with its broad boulevards and beauty salons, was reduced to rubble in the opening days of the war. Israeli attacks have destroyed Gaza’s main courthouse, parliament building and central archives.
Israel says many of its airstrikes have targeted Hamas’s network of tunnels underneath Gaza, which they say also hid hostages taken on Oct. 7. Those tunnels lie beneath densely populated areas in ground that contains important municipal infrastructure, making for a challenging battlefield.
“It’s not a livable city anymore,” said Eyal Weizman, an Israeli-British architect who studies Israel’s approach to the built environment in the Palestinian territories.
Any reconstruction, he said, will require “a whole system of underground infrastructure, because when you attack the subsoil, everything that runs through the ground—the water, the gas, the sewage—is torn.”
Europe’s cities were rebuilt after two world wars. Beirut rose again after civil war and Israeli bombardment. Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa have limped back to life after U.S.-led air campaigns leveled them during the war against Islamic State, though reconstruction has been slow for both.
Gaza faces unique challenges. No one knows who will take control if Israel achieves its aim of destroying Hamas. Israel has said it opposes a U.S. plan to place the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the occupied West Bank, in charge of the strip.
The enclave’s unusual status as a territory with borders controlled by Israel further complicates any road to recovery. After other recent wars in Gaza, Israel has sometimes blocked the entry of construction materials, arguing Hamas could use them for military purposes. In 2015, a full year after a 2014 cease-fire, only one house had been rebuilt—not because of a lack of funds, but because cement wasn’t allowed in.
An analysis by the Shelter Cluster, a coalition of aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, concluded that after the current war, it will take at least a year just to clear the rubble, a task complicated by having to safely remove unexploded ordnance.
Rebuilding the housing will take seven to 10 years, if financing is available, the group said. It will cost some $3.5 billion, it estimates, not including the cost of providing temporary accommodation.
The level of damage in Gaza is almost double what it was during a 2014 conflict, which lasted 50 days, with five times as many completely destroyed buildings, according to the Shelter Cluster. In the current conflict, as of mid-December, more than 800,000 people had no home left to return to, the World Bank found.
“In a best-case scenario, it’s going to take decades,” said Caroline Sandes, an expert in postconflict redevelopment at Kingston University London.
Alaa Hasham, a 33-year-old mother living in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighborhood, used to enjoy sitting in her apartment’s rooftop garden, taking her children to a seaside resort on the weekends and playing chess with friends. She fled with her family soon after the bombing began, joining the small minority of Palestinians who were able to leave for Egypt.
Though her home is destroyed, she is clinging to hope that someday she will return to Gaza.
“People think I’m crazy for wanting to go back,” she said. “Gaza is a special place.”
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