‘It’s like a nuclear bomb has hit’: shocked Palestinians return home to desolation. Families are going back to Gaza City and surrounds to find their neighbourhoods obliterated, with many forced to camp in the ruins.- By Seham Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger in The Guardian

‘All our memories were gone’: shattered buildings in Gaza City after the Israeli offensive.

Photograph: AP

When the Gaza ceasefire took effect a week ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians began to move from the sprawling camps in the south back to their homes in Gaza City and the surrounding area.

For most, it was a shocking and bitter homecoming.

A month after they had been ordered out by Israeli forces, Palestinians filled the coastal road north. It soon became a solid river of people, mostly trudging on foot, carrying the few possessions they had salvaged from one displacement after another.

What the returnees found on arrival was complete desolation. Large swaths of the north had simply been flattened. Their homes and neighbourhoods were no longer recognisable. Their communities had been erased.

The sheer scale of demolition left families with an awful dilemma: stay and seek shelter in the shattered stumps of their former homes, or return to the tented camps in the south where they had a better chance of finding food and water. And looming over that decision was the great unknown of how long the truce would last, and whether it would ever take hold as a lasting peace.

“I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground,” Suhair al-Absi, a 50-year-old mother of seven, said on reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City. “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”

The family had clung to their home until the last minute as the Israeli army pressed forward through Gaza City in September, supposedly to crush any vestiges of Hamas. “We left when the tanks reached the entrance to our neighborhood. We could see them from the window,” Absi said.

It was not only tanks. The family saw one house after another being blown up by “robots” – repurposed armoured vehicles steered by remote control and packed with explosives, which the Israel Defense Forces have been using to minimise their casualties... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/its-like-a-nuclear-bomb-has-hit-shocked-palestinians-return-home-to-desolation?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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UNRWA has the reach, network, and trust to deliver lifesaving aid directly to people in need across Gaza. To meet urgent needs, let UNRWA bring in its aid to Gaza at scale. Let them do their job.

UNRWA

@UNRWA

"UNRWA has the reach, network, and trust to deliver lifesaving aid directly to people in need across #Gaza. To meet urgent needs, let UNRWA bring in its aid to Gaza at scale. Let us do our job."

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"Almost all of Gaza’s farmland is destroyed or inaccessible. A kilo of tomatoes that once cost 60¢, now costs $15 - if found at all. Families who once lived from their land now have no income. People cannot afford the food reappearing in the markets. Until Gaza’s agricultural sector can be rebuilt, there must be an unrestricted flow of aid"... LET UNRWA IN !!!

 UNRWA

@UNRWA

Almost all of #Gaza’s farmland is destroyed or inaccessible. 

 

A kilo of tomatoes that once cost 60¢, now costs $15 - if found at all. 

 

Families who once lived from their land now have no income. 

 

People cannot afford the food reappearing in the markets. 

 

Until Gaza’s agricultural sector can be rebuilt, there must be an unrestricted flow of aid.

 https://x.com/UNRWA/status/1979064969850175685

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"This is a UN vehicle entering Gaza today. It looks like a scene in a dystopian movie." Assal Rad

Tom Fletcher

@UNReliefChief

[United Nations] Entering Gaza earlier today. Amid practical work to save lives, we also bear witness.

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

This is a UN vehicle entering Gaza today. It looks like a scene in a dystopian movie. 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1979268864270831883/photo/1 

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‘One of the oldest urban centres on the planet’: Gaza’s rich history in ruins. The territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present- William Dalrymple in The Guardian

The bombed-out Great Mosque of Gaza, once a crusader church, in January 2024. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

William Dalrymple

Fri 17 Oct 2025

"As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.

Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.

Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.

Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and the Mediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England..." READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/one-of-the-oldest-urban-centres-on-the-planet-gazas-rich-history-in-ruins

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Empire: The History of Gaza, PODCAST presented by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, is available online https://www.playpodcast.net/podcast/empire/

“After 2 years of heavy Israeli Forces bombardment with more than 67,000 people reported killed, the infamous death trap of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and finally the silent killing of famine, civilians are now confronted with shocking arbitrary summary killings by Hamas members. The ceasefire should bring respite and hope not more killings. No one should escape justice and accountability.” — UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini

UNRWA

@UNRWA

“After 2 years of heavy Israeli Forces bombardment with more than 67,000 people reported killed, the infamous death trap of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and finally the silent killing of #famine, civilians are now confronted with shocking arbitrary summary killings by Hamas members. The #ceasefire should bring respite and hope not more killings. No one should escape justice and accountability.” — UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini   https://x.com/UNRWA/status/1978470081177727302

 

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"The Red Cross say it'll be a "massive challenge" to find the graves of the last Israeli captives under mountains of rubble from Israel's levelling of Gaza. Having created a near-impossible task for Hamas, Israel's using it to justify keeping up its genocidal starvation campaign" Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

"The Red Cross say it'll be a "massive challenge" to find the graves of the last Israeli captives under mountains of rubble from Israel's levelling of Gaza. 

 

Having created a near-impossible task for Hamas, Israel's using it to justify keeping up its genocidal starvation campaign"

 

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

 

"Israel's levelling of Gaza City in the days before the ceasefire has doubtless made it far harder for Hamas to locate dead Israeli captives under the rubble. Which gives Israel the pretext to continue starving Gaza – collective punishment that Israel has utterly normalised."

 

 

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

 

"Israel is the excuse to snatch away freedoms we once took for granted

In interviews and a comment article over the weekend, the UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson made clear she plans to exploit the pause in the Gaza genocide to snuff out criticism of Israel’s criminal actions – and, of course, her own government’s collusion in that criminality.

 

Naturally, the British establishment media have been keen to amplify her message that there will be painful consequences both for individuals who continue protesting against Israeli atrocities and for institutions, such as universities, that mistakenly assume they have a duty to uphold centuries-old freedoms by tolerating such protests.

 

These protests, let us remember, are fully in line with a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which declared:

 

a) Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian populations there – and has been doing so for decades.

 

b) Western governments are obligated to do what they can to bring that illegal occupation and Israel’s apartheid system to an end as quickly as possible.

 

Instead, those same governments are violating the ruling, and international law, both by continuing to support Israel’s criminality and by preventing their own citizens from putting pressure on them to end their support.

 

 The government of Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has even categorised protest against genocide as “support for terrorism”. For the first time in British history, a direct-action group, Palestine Action, has been banned..." READ MORE  https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1977756356833665084

 

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"Not only is Israel still killing and starving Palestinians, Israeli officials are openly declaring their intention to occupy Gaza. But none of that is part of the dominant media narrative about the “ceasefire” at the moment." Assal Rad

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

"Not only is Israel still killing and starving Palestinians, Israeli officials are openly declaring their intention to occupy Gaza. But none of that is part of the dominant media narrative about the “ceasefire” at the moment."

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

"If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them."

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"“Evictions” makes it sound like they didn’t pay their rent. An indigenous population is being forced out of their homes, off their land, brutalized by security forces & threatened with violence. Call it what it is. #Palestine " Assal Rad  https://x.com/AssalRad