“A City of Ghosts” — Returning to Rafah to Find Death and Destruction
Over 80 Palestinians have been killed across Gaza since the ceasefire took hold, 49 of them in Rafah alone
On the morning of January 19, Khalil Fahjan left his family’s small, damp tent in Deir al-Balah and quickly headed south to his family home in Rafah. The deadline for a “ceasefire” agreement to halt Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, at least temporarily, was supposed to go into effect at 8:30 a.m. that morning. He had not been to Rafah in more than seven months, since the Israeli military invaded the city, and he was desperate to go home.
Fahjan, 25, was unaware that the Israeli military had delayed the implementation of the deal by nearly three hours, attacking and killing Palestinians in Khan Younis and northern Gaza in the interim.
When he arrived in his neighborhood of Tal-al-Sultan, he struggled to comprehend the scene before him. “It was such utter devastation that I could see the sea from central Rafah, which is four kilometers away,” Fahjan told Drop Site News. “All the houses in my area were turned into piles of rubble. At first glance, I couldn’t identify my neighborhood or my home. Every landmark that I had once known was erased. It is now a city of ghosts.”
He described walking through an open graveyard, watching people collecting decomposing body parts and human remains in an effort to identify their loved ones amid unexploded munitions on the streets and inside buildings.
When he reached his home, it was barely standing. The interior was burnt out and charred, and the walls were crumbling and riddled with bullet holes. “My house, where all my memories, my work, my dreams, my certificate—where my entire life was—had simply vanished,” he said. “This war has stolen everything from us. I look at Rafah and ask myself whether or not I will stay in a tent for the next two or three years. The city needs 10 to 20 years to get back to a sense of what it was before.”
Before the war began 15 months ago, Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, was home to some 280,000 people; and the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt was the only path into Gaza not controlled by Israel. All that was to violently change.
As Israel’s aerial bombardment intensified, Palestinians across Gaza were forcibly displaced southward, many to Khan Younis at first and then—as Israeli troops invaded Khan Younis in early December following a week-long ceasefire—to Rafah. The number of people in Rafah swelled to more than 1.5 million, nearly three quarters of Gaza’s population.
In April, Israel announced it would invade Rafah despite dire warnings from humanitarian organizations, the United Nations, and other international bodies. Even President Biden warned he would not supply offensive weapons to Israel if it invaded Rafah, only to characteristically backtrack.
The Israeli invasion, when it came in May, forced over a million Palestinians to be displaced yet again, many of them cramming into Deir al-Balah and Mawasi Khan Younis. The Israeli military took over the Philadelphi corridor that runs along the border with Egypt and shut down the Rafah border crossing. In the ensuing months, Israeli troops proceeded to systematically demolish much of the area. The Biden administration maintained the steady flow of U.S. weapons and political support to Israel.
According to a debris quantification assessment conducted by UN-Habitat and the UN Environment Program, the debris generated by the war on Gaza increased from 22.9 million tonnes on January 7 2024 to 50.8 million tonnes by December 1 2024, marking a 121 percent rise in 11 months. The most significant increase was observed in Rafah where the amount of debris grew by a staggering 1,898 percent—a nearly twenty-fold increase.
After the “ceasefire” went into effect last week, Israel repeatedly violated the agreement, killing dozens of civilians returning to their devastated neighborhoods, the majority of them in Rafah. More than 80 Palestinians have been killed across Gaza since the ceasefire took hold, Dr. Zaher al-Wahaidi, director of the information center at the Ministry of Health, told Drop Site News—49 of them in Rafah alone. Meanwhile, the official toll of confirmed deaths in Gaza continues to shoot up as dozens of bodies are retrieved from under the rubble. Over 470 bodies have been recovered since January 19, al-Wahaidi said—150 of them in Rafah.
“We need caterpillars and bulldozers to clear up the wreckage and recover these corpses. People are getting back to literally nothing. Rafah is destroyed, and the killing and bombing continue there,” al-Wahaidi told Drop Site. “Nearly 700 bodies are still trapped under the rubble in Rafah; retrieving them mainly depends on allowing this essential machinery that can help with this cumbersome mission."
A week into the “ceasefire”, some residents of Rafah are still unable to return to their devastated neighborhoods. Mostafa Sabasi, 33, was displaced four times along with his family after the Israeli invasion of Rafah in May. When the ceasefire went into effect, he finally returned to Rafah and found his home intact, albeit with the windows and doors blown out, the walls damaged, and the roof cracked. “I was lucky that my home was somehow still standing, but reconstructing it will need a lot of time and effort,” Sabasi told Drop Site. However, he said he was unable to stay in his damaged home as it is in al-Jneina, a neighborhood in eastern Rafah that Israeli troops have repeatedly fired upon over the past several days. Sabasi is now back, along with 10 members of his family in their shelter in Khan Younis.
“I know that the Israeli army leaves immense destruction behind in every place it enters, but Rafah was totally destroyed. I never predicted I would see that scale of destruction. The city has become a flat landscape with debris piled up everywhere,” Sabasi said. “All the public, educational, and health facilities were reduced to rubble. It really took me hours to realize that I was in Rafah. People went back to see their homes; however, nearly all people have lost theirs,” he said, adding, “along the streets were remains of people. I saw jaws, skulls, skeletons, limbs, and fingers. People simply don’t know where to go or what to do.”
“This war deprived us of everything and killed our dreams and passion. My house was damaged, my work stopped, my dreams faded away, and my family was separated. Several members of my relatives were also murdered during the genocide. That sense of tranquility, safety, and stability is all gone. I feel insecure living in a city that only paints a miserable and traumatic picture since many of my neighbors were killed and all of the neighborhoods have been leveled. In and around my home were multiple exploded shells, fired rounds, and undetonated and detonated missiles. I was very alarmed to walk the streets because I could lose my life at any moment.”
When the initial phase of the ceasefire agreement officially took hold, 21-year-old Fedaa Sababah was elated—she could finally return to her home in Rafah after being displaced in Mwasi, Khan Younis for over eight months. Yet she soon discovered that on the second day of the ceasefire, Israeli tanks and troops had repositioned in an area near her home in the “Saudi” neighborhood and her house was inaccessible.
“When my grandfather first heard the news of the coming Rafah invasion, he couldn’t take it and died of a heart attack,” Sababah told Drop Site. “I feel like I’ve lost everything. The ceasefire was a breath of fresh air, but our happiness was incomplete because I lost irreplaceable things. Then came the return to Rafah, which was a journey mixed with pain and hope. When I entered it, I felt an enormous shock to see my home in ruins.”
“Explosives were everywhere. While we were heading towards our home, some people warned us against going to specific areas because many mines were planted there. We were about to walk across those areas. We’re really lucky to have escaped death. Loads of explosives, mines, bullets, and remains of grenades and weapons from the Israeli army were scattered all over our neighborhoods. We were terrified to walk the streets, so we followed the tank prints to avoid any unseen mines or explosives,” Sababah recalled. “The scenes of decomposing bodies being recovered from under the rubble were the most difficult ones I’ve had to see in my entire life. Everyone was picking up bodies and pieces. No one could know whose leg that is, whose hand that is, whose head that is.”
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This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
This is what the US and Israel do.