Returning Gazans take stock of destruction after cease-fire

When a cease-fire took effect in Gaza this month, Ibrahim Raba’a went back to Jabalia—the scene of rounds of intense fighting between Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Israeli military—to see what had become of his home.

- Abeer Ayyoub, Jared Malsin & Anat Peled

When a cease-fire took effect in Gaza this month, Ibrahim Raba'a went back to Jabalia—the scene of rounds of intense fighting between Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Israeli military—to see what had become of his home.

“I was shocked by what I saw. The whole area is destroyed,” said Raba’a, 35. The apartment building that housed his extended family had been reduced to rubble, he said, and the small coffee shop he ran was badly damaged and filled with drifting yellow sand.

Across swaths of the Gaza Strip, the extent of destruction from 15 months of war is so vast that many Palestinians, able to survey the damage for the first time since the fighting stopped, say they don’t think they will be able to return to their homes soon.

Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. There is no running water or electricity in much of the strip. Many dead bodies are believed buried under collapsed buildings. In parts of Jabalia, the landscape was so strewn with debris that it was difficult to find a place to pitch a tent, residents seeking to return said.

The scale of the damage will weigh heavily on efforts to rebuild in the Gaza Strip and likely cast a long shadow over postwar recovery for the Palestinian enclave. If and when there is a durable peace, the challenge of reconstruction in Gaza will rival that of any battlefield in the recent history of warfare.

“The only real close historical analogy is the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and an expert on aerial bombing.