Rafah is gone. Razed to the ground. And it’s not the only city wiped out by the Israeli army
Rafah, razed to the ground, in a June 5 2025 satellite photo
Nir Hasson, Yarden Michaeli and Avi Scharf report in Haaretz on 12 June 2025:
“In Jabalya, there is no longer a house, a tree, or a single human being,” a physician from the northern Gaza Strip who calls himself Dr. Ezzideen wrote on X last December. “It has become a vast wasteland, its residents forcibly displaced, its homes obliterated, its animals killed, and even its trees cut down and left to wither. This image will stand as a testament to one of the darkest and most harrowing periods in history.”
The destruction of Jabalya refugee camp became a symbol, but today it’s no longer a unique case. In the 20 months that have passed since October 7, the Israel Defense Forces has also destroyed Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, eastern Gaza City and the suburbs of Khan Yunis – and the IDF is now completing the erasure of Rafah.
In October 2023, a satellite passed over Rafah and photographed the city. The image showed a large city, a dense mosaic of buildings, solar panels, domes of mosques, roads, public squares, farmland and orchards. At the beginning of this month a satellite again passed over the city – or, more accurately, what was once a city.
Hardly anything remains. The current image shows a two-dimensional gray surface strewn with rubble. The overwhelming majority of the buildings have been destroyed and leveled. The roads are plowed up. The many greenhouses and orchards have disappeared as though they never existed.
At the war’s start, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu didn’t rule out Israel using an atomic bomb. Effectively, the proportion of structures that have been eradicated in Rafah and in Jabalya refugee camp is higher than what was destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Indeed, the destruction in Rafah also stands out in comparison with other extreme cases in modern history. It is more widespread and methodical than the damage imposed on Aleppo, Mosul, Sarajevo and Kabul. The extent of devastation recalls the heavy damage sustained by the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in 2022-2023, though the population of that city was one-quarter that of Rafah.
On the eve of the war, the Rafah metropolitan area had a population of 275,000, like that of Haifa. There were 56,000 people living in Jabalya camp, similar to Yavneh. Beit Lahia had 108,000 residents, like Herzliya, and Beit Hanoun had 62,000, like Givatayim. Almost 30,000 people, equivalent to Arad, lived in Abasan al-Kabira, a suburb of Khan Yunis that no longer exists. An adjacent suburb, Bani Suheila, had a population of 46,000, like Carmiel.
All are now erased.
And these are only the cities that have been completely, or largely, wiped out. The IDF has also destroyed and leveled whole neighborhoods in the two big cities: Gaza City and Khan Yunis. A case in point is Shujaiyeh, Gaza City’s large eastern neighborhood – wiped off the face of the earth.
All told, two-thirds of the structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged – 174,000 out of what were about a quarter of a million buildings.
Nearly 90,000 structures – more than a third of those in the Strip – have been decimated or have sustained significant destruction. Together with 52,000 structures that have suffered moderate damage, they already account for more than 50 percent of the prewar total. According to the United Nations, another 33,000 structures show signs of damage, though it’s difficult to estimate the extent.
These data, which were collected by the United Nation’s Satellite Center, were updated in April. The total number of structures that have been destroyed or damaged according to the UN is identical to the figure determined by Dr. Corey Scher and Prof. Jamon Van Den Hoek, researchers at Oregon State University who have kept track regularly of the destruction in Gaza.
In addition to residential structures, the IDF has destroyed hospitals, infrastructure facilities, factories, mosques, churches, markets and commercial centers. The IDF has also devastated 2,300 educational structures of all kinds, and today 501 of the 564 schools in the Strip require rebuilding or extensive repair.
Of the roads, 81 percent have been wrecked or damaged. A large part of the electrical infrastructure has been demolished, along with water and sewage lines, agricultural structures, and animal pens, chicken coops and fishing areas. According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, the number of egg-laying hens has decreased by 99 percent since 2023, the number of cattle by 94 percent, and the quantity of fish being caught has fallen by 93 percent.
No less than 50 million tons of construction rubble and debris is scattered across the Strip, and the UN estimates that it will take two decades to clear. So broad and methodical was the destruction that it’s hard to imagine a return to normal life in the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, more than a million people are huddling in the immense tent cities that have sprung up in the Muwasi area on the coast, and in the western section of Gaza City. Lately an additional wave of displaced Gazans streamed into the already densely crowded area, to the point where tents are now being erected on the Gaza City’s piers, in garbage dumps and on the rubble.
The displaced Gazans are living without sewage facilities, without running water, without electricity, and have no way to cook the little aid they receive. And as summer begins, they are now also under assault by mosquitoes. And hunger looms in every corner.
The proportion of structures that have been eradicated in Rafah and in Jabalya refugee camp is higher than what was destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Fantasies of eliminating the Strip are omnipresent in Israel. During 20 months of war, there have been tens of thousands of calls in social media to flatten, annihilate and eradicate the Gaza Strip. Members of the security cabinet, MKs and influential journalists repeatedly demand obliteration.
In right-wing circles, a new term is being bandied about: “Zarbiving” Gaza, named for Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, a rabbinical court judge in Tel Aviv and in the urban settlement of Ariel, and a reservist in the engineering unit of the Givati infantry brigade. Zarbiv has boasted several times in interviews on the Bibi-ist Channel 14 of the destruction he and his buddies are wreaking in Gaza with D9 bulldozers. “We have started to knock down buildings of five, six, seven stories. The system is improving, and it works.”
The IDF’s obliteration of the Strip can be divided into five waves. The first wave took place immediately after October 7, and was the work of the air force. During the war’s first week, the air force dropped 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, in a campaign compared to which the U.S. military’s assault on ISIS in 2017 pales.
The destruction was cheered on by key figures in the Israeli public. “I can’t get to sleep at night if I haven’t seen houses collapsing in Gaza,” Channel 14’s Shimon Riklin said in December 2023. “What can I do – more, more, more, more houses, more towers, so they have no place to return to.”
The second wave of destruction was unleashed at the beginning of 2024, when the IDF carried out an operation to create a one-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the Strip’s borders with Israel. Thousands of structures were destroyed then, concurrent with the establishment of the Netzarim Corridor, south of Gaza City, which became increasingly wide (the areas that were leveled around the Netzarim Corridor alone constitute more than 10 percent of the Strip’s area). At this stage, bulldozers and explosives replaced the air force as the primary instruments of destruction.
“The truly surprising thing is the speed with which it all became natural and logical,” reservist Yuval Katef wrote of his service in the Netzarim Corridor. “After a few hours, you find that you’re trying to force yourself to be impressed by the dimensions of the destruction, and to come out with lines like, ‘This is really crazy!,’ but the truth is that you get used to it quite quickly. It becomes banal.”
The third stage in the flattening of the Strip started about a year ago, with the assault on Rafah, at the far south. At that time, the IDF started to broaden and entrench the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. At this stage the army developed a new and efficient method of destruction: unmanned armored personnel carriers dispatched on “kamikaze” missions.
Old APCs – known as “Zeldas” – were packed with large quantities of explosives and sent, by remote control, to buildings that had been slated for destruction. Hundreds of structures were razed using this method, with the sound of the detonation audible as far away as Tel Aviv.
The fourth stage, toward the end of last year, was the devastation the IDF inflicted on the cities of the northern Strip: Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun and Jabalya refugee camp. This chapter concluded at the end of December, when Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, in Beit Lahia, turned himself in to the IDF. The images of Abu Safiya walking toward the soldiers against an apocalyptic backdrop made a deep impression internationally, and made it clear that the IDF was leaving behind heaps of rubble.
In January 2025, with the declaration of a cease-fire, the wrecking machine stopped. At the time a TikTok trend came into being in Gaza: Hundreds of thousands of civilians returned to their homes, and many filmed themselves clearing away the wreckage and arranging a small living space for themselves amid what were once their homes. It was a declaration of determination, on the one hand, and an aspiration to a bit of sanity, on the other.
Shujaiyeh in the end of May. Aside from residential buildings, the IDF destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, factories, mosques, churches, markets and commercial centers.Credit: Planet Labs PBC
But the reprieve was short-lived.
On March 18, Israel violated the cease-fire with a night attack that took the lives of about 300 women and children, and two months later the IDF launched Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Under a new chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, the sowing of destruction became explicit policy, and was carried out more exhaustively. At this stage, which is still ongoing, private contractors are being used, and paid according to the number of structures they raze.
“We will operate in additional areas and we will destroy all the infrastructure, above and below the ground,” Zamir declared ahead of the operation. The journalist Amit Segal asserted that “for the first time, they are talking about destroying all the infrastructure above the ground.” Half a year earlier, following a visit to Jabalya, Segal wrote, “Photographs cannot describe the dimensions of the destruction, from horizon to horizon. In the north of the Strip what remain are mainly slabs of concrete, sand, vast piles of garbage and packs of hungry dogs.”
After a few hours, you find that you’re trying to force yourself to be impressed by the dimensions of the destruction, and to come out with lines like, ‘This is really crazy!,’ but the truth is that you get used to it quite quickly. It becomes banal. As the days pass, and the extent of the destruction becomes clearer, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does in fact have a day-after plan: mass expulsion of the residents of Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu speaks openly about this: We will push the Gazans south, we will find countries that are willing to take them in, and in the end the majority will agree to leave “of their own volition.” “We are destroying more and more houses,” the prime minister told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last month, according to a report in Maariv. “They will have nowhere to return to.”
The starting gun was fired on February 4, when U.S. President Donald Trump stated in a press conference that, “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip… We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons.” From that moment the fantasy became a working plan. This is how Finance Minister and security cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich put it: “No more raids. We conquer and stay, until the annihilation of Hamas. On the way, we destroy what still remains of the Strip. The IDF is moving population from the areas of combat and is not leaving a single stone unturned. The population will come to the south of the Strip, and from there, with God’s help, to third countries. This is a change in the course of history, no less. That’s the main thing.”
It was against this background that Rafah was erased, joining the eradication in the Morag Corridor – a new corridor north of the city. It now looks as though the IDF is continuing to expand the swath of annihilation northward, toward Khan Yunis.
After laying waste to the suburbs, the army started to accelerate the flattening of structures in the city itself. The 7th Brigade is now operating in the area, and its commander has stated: “After we’re done, they won’t be able to come back here for years.”
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Prof. Eliav Lieblich, an expert on international law from Tel Aviv University, explains that “international law permits destruction in two situations: if the structure has an effective contribution to the enemy’s war effort, or in a case of military necessity – for example, if a wall has to be knocked down in order to pass.
“Even in these situations,” he notes, “there are special protections [guaranteed] for medical facilities, agricultural fields, water facilities and more. To this day I haven’t heard even the beginning of an account that can explain how the extensive destruction can be justified.”
According to Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School with an expertise in international law, “both the extent and the systematic nature of the destruction of homes and other structures with key social functions, suggests that the goal of the military campaign is the forcible and permanent displacement of the Palestinians of Gaza, which is a violation of [international humanitarian law], a war crime and a crime against humanity. Therefore, it is no longer a question of assessing the legality of specific actions (e.g., whether the destruction of a particular structure satisfies imperative military necessity) – but it is the whole of the current military campaign that is, accordingly, unlawful.”
One reason that some legal experts and historians believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, is the vast scale of destruction. They include the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Bartov maintains that, “this is not a war, that is a false representation.”
All the signs, he says, show that Israel is acting “to destroy completely Palestinian existence in Gaza and to render the Strip uninhabitable.”
According to Bartov, “If there is deliberate and systematic destruction of hospitals, educational institutions, cultural institutions, religious centers and infrastructure, one can infer from this that these structures are not being targeted because Hamas personnel were hiding in them, but because they want to prevent a group from existing as a group.”
Bartov adds, “It’s difficult to find points of comparison for the massive destruction the IDF is wreaking. You have to go back to the destroyed cities of World War II. The dimensions here are inconceivable. Whether the IDF generals understand it or not, the goal is to ‘disappear’ Palestinian society and its culture and to establish something else in Gaza, with no memory of what was there before.”
The historian Dotan Halevy, who has written extensively about the history of Gaza, views the destruction as a continuation of the 1948 Nakba. “The Gaza Strip,” he notes, “is the only region along the coastal plain that has preserved a continuous history. Its obliteration now is destroying historical remnants from a period of hundreds of years.”
The situation of Gaza is singular, Halevy points out, because Israel is leveling it without its residents having anywhere to escape to. “For three decades, Gaza has been a closed enclave, in which its people are imprisoned. In contrast to German cities in World War II, or to Aleppo in Syria, it’s not possible to simply pick up and look for a haven. The consequence is a compressed annihilation experience from which there is no way to escape. The inhabitants of Gaza are locked into the noise of the bombing and are breathing the dust of the rubble.”
In many circles today, observers see what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a sign of the collapse of the international order that came into being after World War II. Limor Yehuda thinks it’s premature to despair completely of the international system. According to Dr. Yehuda, who heads the Shemesh Center for the Study of a Partnership-Based Peace, under establishment at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, “We are undoubtedly in a situation in which that order is crumbling. All the norms of international law are held in contempt, and the world is doing nothing. On the other hand, we should remember that in Bosnia, too, it took three and a half years.
“In the end, this accursed war will end, the false illusions will be shattered and we will come back to the starting point: Between the Jordan and the sea there are two peoples, no one is going anywhere, and the choice is to live together or die together. In the meantime,everyone has to ask themselves how they can cease to collaborate with the mechanism of destruction.”
“We hold an unshakable faith that, one day, justice will rise,” wrote Dr. Ezzideen from Gaza. “The world will stand in solemn silence, mourning this genocide, and spend even longer lamenting the demise of justice and the collapse of humanity in our time. On that day, the world will weep, not only for us but for the shattered remnants of its own soul.”
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