Palestinians have returned to breathtaking scenes of destruction in the Gaza City district of Shujaiah after Israeli troops withdrew, ending a two-week offensive there.
Civil defence workers have said that so far, they have found the bodies of 60 people in the rubble.
Families who fled the assault ventured back into Shujaiah to see the condition of their homes or salvage whatever they could.
Nearly every building was flattened to rubble for block after block, leaving giant concrete piles and twisted rebar. Here and there, grey gutted concrete frames still stood a few stories high.
The ever-present buzzing sound of Israeli military drones hung in the hot summer air as people on bicycles or horse-drawn carts made their way over dirt paths where the streets had been bulldozed away.
Sharif Abu Shanab found his family's four-story building collapsed. “I can’t enter it. I can’t take anything out of it, not even a can of tuna. We have nothing, no food or drink,” he said.
He said since fleeing the district, his family has slept in the streets. “Where do we go and to whom? We have no home or anything,” he said in despair.
“There’s only one solution, hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”
'Unable to respond to calls'
The Israeli military has invaded Shujaiah several times in the nine-month war in Gaza.
Its latest assault began in late June, the assault sent some 80,000 people fleeing, most into nearby areas, and it is not known how many people remained in the district during the fighting.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday evening that its operations in Shujaiah had ended.
Gaza’s Civil Defense organisation said that during Israel’s offensive, its emergency crews had largely been unable to respond to calls for help from residents in destroyed buildings.
After the Israeli pullout, its crews entered and recovered 60 bodies, it said, adding that the search was ongoing.
More bodies were believed to be buried under rubble, but the organisation has little heavy equipment to clear debris.
The United Nations estimated earlier this week that about 300,000 Palestinians were still in northern Gaza after much of the population left earlier in the war.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are now experiencing widespread hunger while crammed into squalid tent camps.
