On Tuesday, I spent a day with the IDF troops in northern Gaza, from the border into the heart of Jabalya, where soldiers have been fighting at Hamas regrouping efforts for the last month. Jabalya is a large, sprawling neighborhood located north and northeast of Gaza City; it has a refugee camp that dates back to 1948, which has become the heart of a dense urban neighborhood.
The journey into Jabalya was in an IDF Humvee, which had a driver and soldier in the passenger seat. Another man, positioned above them, was clad with a machine gun mounted on the vehicle. The vehicle had been stripped down so that around eight people could squeeze on opposing benches, which had seat belts.
The top of the Humvee was draped with a kind of camouflage netting, which the dust of Gaza has turned into a sort of blend of gray and khaki.
The ride was relatively comfortable. Driving in daylight isn’t common in Gaza; we departed from an area near Zikim, at the Erez West crossing, which was opened during the war to make it possible for humanitarian aid direct access.
Commercial-style trucks ply this route, all part of the coordination between Israel and the international community in the aid efforts, particularly to northern Gaza. Where the trucks end up isn’t clear, but the road has been improved and is paved such that it connects with the existing road network of Gaza north of the Shati beach area, which was once filled with small hotels and some 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 carries south towards Mawasi. Of course, this has now been changed by the war, and the IDF now controls an area south of Gaza City called the Netzarim corridor that intersects with Rashid Road. The Humvees drove quickly over this part before heading inland.
Now, the area along the beach is deserted. A few homes still stand, but much of the area has been impacted by the fighting, with many destroyed or damaged buildings. As we headed inland, we likely crossed near Atatra, but it was hard to tell because there were 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 mean that the areas are 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, 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 were no civilians here, and the whole area appears deserted. Hamas is gone, ostensibly, and the IDF is not operating heavily in most places, making the area a kind of deserted urban landscape.
It has low-lying hills, and it is hard to make out where once roads would have been because so much of the landscape has been changed by fighting and by armored vehicles that have passed through. Any semblance of paved roads seems to have ceased to exist, and much of what remains of the roads are dirt tracks that kick up dust. Not all the buildings were destroyed by the fighting, but the impact is very visible.
Since the war began last year, the IDF has come back to some of these areas several times, now for the third or fourth time. Areas between Shati and the border first saw action on October 27, 2023, when the 401st Armored Brigade rolled south from areas near Zikim and Yad Mordechai. Beit Hanun and Beit Lahiya have not only been fought over on land, but airstrikes have done extensive damage.
Hamas's presence in the area
Hamas is no longer present in northern Gaza, leading to talks now of how Israel might permanently secure this area once the Jabalya offensive is completed – much remains to be seen about what comes next.
A continuous year of fighting here must mean that this whole area is 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, totaling approximately 60,000 people who evacuated over the last month.
The sheer lack of people in these areas 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 demolished and rebuilt.
As we drove through neighborhoods between Beit Lahiya and Jabalya, I tried to scour for signs of what had once been civilian life, like storefronts, or for anything that might resemble a school or an advertisement; I even wagered to come across graffiti supporting Hamas.
What struck me was the absence of any signs of what had once been a thriving neighborhood. Shops were empty, some boarded up or burned, with nothing to indicate what was sold there before.
In Mosul, during the war on ISIS, this kind of situation would yield shops that once sold tools or were a small grocery and looked like they had just been abandoned. Empty homes still felt like civilian homes, where their inhabitants left quickly.
Northern Gaza isn’t like that. More than a whole year of the war stripped most of these places of every sign of before; there were no advertisements for Coca-Cola and barely any graffiti, like what is seen in the West Bank. I did get a glimpse of rainbow colors at one point, maybe what was once a kindergarten or a daycare, and also saw one large water storage facility that seemed to say TIKA on it, the name of a Turkish government aid organization, perhaps 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 was a vacation villa; 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 the border.