On November 5, I spent a day with the Israel Defense Forces in northern Gaza. The trip took me from the border of Israel and Gaza into the heart of Jabalya, where the IDF has been fighting Hamas for the last month. Jabalya is a large, sprawling neighborhood north and northeast of Gaza City. It has a refugee camp that dates back to 1948, and the camp became the heart of a dense urban neighborhood.
I went to Jabalya in an IDF Humvee. The vehicle has a driver and a soldier in the passenger seat next to the driver. There is also a man positioned above them with a machine gun that is mounted on the vehicle. In the pack, the vehicle has been stripped down so people around eight people can squeeze on opposing benches. The benches have seat belts. The top of the Humvee was draped with cam netting, which the dust of Gaza had turned into a blend of grey and khaki.
It's a relatively comfortable ride. Driving in daylight isn’t usual in Gaza, and we departed from an area near Zikim. This crossing into Gaza is called Erez West, and it was opened during the war in the Spring of 2024 to make it possible for humanitarian aid to cross directly from Israel into northern Gaza. Commercia-style trucks ply this route. They are part of a coordination between Israel and the international community, and they bring aid into areas of northern Gaza.
It’s not entirely clear where the trucks go, but it would appear this road has been improved and paved so that it connects with the existing road network of Gaza north of the Shati beach area. This area was once a site of small hotels and also some Gazan villas and small private homes with little courtyards. There was parking near the beach.In the old days, this road would have headed south along the coast to reach Rashid Road, which goes all the way south toward Mawasi. Of course, this has now been changed by the war and the IDF controls an area south of Gaza City called the Netzarim corridor that intersects with Rashid road. We didn’t get to see much of this because our Humvees drove quickly parallel to the coast before heading inland.
The area along the beach today is deserted. A few homes still stand but much of the area has been impacted from the fighting. This means many buildings are destroyed or damaged. As we headed inland we likely crossed near Atatra, a village. It’s hard to tell where one is because there are no road signs or signs of any sort in northern Gaza in the areas impacted by war. This is not unique to Gaza, many war zones in cities leave the areas in waste. I’ve seen this in other wars when I covered the war on ISIS. I saw the destruction in Sinjar in northern Iraq and also in Mosul and many villages.
As we drove up into an area between Beit Lahiya and Jabalya the road continued through an increasingly dense urban landscape. There are no civilians here and the whole area appears deserted. Hamas is gone and the IDF is not operating heavily in most places. That means this is a kind of deserted urban landscape. This area has low-lying hills. It’s hard to make out where once roads would have been, because so much of the landscape has been changed by fighting and also by armored vehicles that have passed through. This means any semblance of paved roads seems to have ceased to exist.
Much of what remains of the roads are dirt tracks that kick up dust. The buildings are not all destroyed by fighting, but many of them seem to have been impacted by the last year of war. The IDF has operated in some of these areas several times since the war began. What that means is that the IDF is now clearing Jabalya of terrorists for the third or fourth time since the war began. Areas between Shati and the border first saw action on October 27 when the IDF’s 401st armored brigade rolled south from areas near Zikim and Yad Mordechai. Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya have not only been fought over but airstrikes have done extensive damage.
Hamas's presence in the area
Hamas is no longer present in northern Gaza. There is talk now of how the IDF and Israel may permanently secure this area once the Jabalya offensive is completed. Much remains to be seen about what comes next. What I noticed is that a year of fighting here must mean that this whole area is kind of preserved in a stasis that lacks clarity about what comes next. The residents evacuated to the south, many of them a year ago and some more recently from Jabalya camp. There were some 60,000 people there who evacuated over the last month.
The lack of people in these areas of northern Gaza is not surprising, given what is known about the war, how Hamas has hidden behind civilians, and how the IDF asked people to evacuate. However, it also is not normal to see whole towns and areas devoid of people. There is so much damage to many buildings that one would assume it will take a long time to rebuild this area. Rubble will have to be cleared, and buildings will be demolished and rebuilt. It’s difficult to estimate what percentage of this area will need reconstruction, but it appears to be a lot of northern Gaza. On the other hand, Gaza has been through many wars in the past and areas have been reconstructed.
As we drove through neighborhoods between Beit Lahiya and Jabalya, I tried to look for signs of what had once been civilian life. I looked for signs on storefronts or for anything that might resemble a school or an advertisement. I thought maybe I’d see graffiti supporting Hamas. However, what struck me was the absence of any signs of what had once been a thriving neighborhood. Shops were empty, some of them boarded up or burned from fighting. But there was no sign of what these shops had sold before. I remember in Mosul during the war on ISIS you could walk into the shops and you’d find a whole shop that once sold tools or a small grocery, like it had just been abandoned. Homes that were empty still felt like civilian homes, where people had left quickly.Northern Gaza didn’t feel that way. It felt like a whole year of war had stripped most of these places of every sign of what had come before. No advertisements for Coca-Cola, barely any graffiti that one sees in the West Bank. I did get a glimpse of rainbow colors at one point, maybe a kindergarten or daycare in the background. I saw one large water storage facility that seemed to say TIKA on it, the name of a Turkish government aid organization. Maybe this had been built by money from Ankara years ago.
On the coast of Gaza, driving back to Israel, I spotted a large white home that looked like it once belonged to a wealthy landowner or someone’s villa for vacations. It seemed to have blue windows. Was this one of the few buildings to survive in this area. I turned around to snap a shot, but the rear of the building seemed gutted by fire. Was it the same building or had I imagined it? By the time I looked again, it was gone behind a dune, and our Humvee was jumping over a bumpy road heading back to Israel.