GAZA: Just hours after the two-week offensive on Gaza City’s Shujaiya district ended, Palestinians had already found 60 bodies as they picked through the piles of concrete and dust left behind, officials in Gaza said Thursday. Families of missing residents and civil defense agency crews moved in for the grim search after the Zionist entity announced late Wednesday that it had ended its operation there against Hamas.

“Once the (Zionist) occupation forces withdrew from the Shujaiya neighborhood, civil defense crews, with local residents, managed to recover about 60 martyrs up to now,” agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said. Some 85 percent of buildings are now “uninhabitable” and Shujaiya has been turned into a “disaster zone”, he added, estimating that 120,000 people had been left homeless.

Residents who returned found a ghost town. Sabrin Abu Asr said the district was “in ruins” as she went back to see the debris of her home. Like most buildings, only a skeletal frame remained after two weeks of clashes between the Zionist army and Palestinian militants that forced tens of thousands of people to flee. The rest lay collapsed in piles of crushed concrete, cinder blocks and twisted rebar.

Zionist troops launched a ground offensive at the beginning of May in the southern city of Rafah, which was then presented by the Zionist entity as the last Hamas stronghold. But since then, Zionist forces have attacked the north and center of the Gaza Strip.

A full evacuation order was issued for Shujaiya on June 27. The Zionist entity has warned that all of Gaza City will remain a “dangerous” combat zone. Former residents could only bundle whatever they could salvage and seek shelter elsewhere, carrying possessions on a bike, a donkey-drawn cart or on their backs. “Shujaiya district lies in ruins ... we are devastated,” said Abu Asr, who left by foot with a single can of food. “Our plight must be felt by others. Someone needs to empathize with the people of Gaza,” she added.

‘Defies description’

The Zionist military said it dismantled eight tunnels and killed dozens of militants during the operation in Shujaiya. Zionist forces left behind a destroyed armored vehicle, now standing between two buildings nearly flattened in the fighting. It has since been scrapped it for parts, its door and roof already gone.

Nearby, Mohamad Nairi, his hands and t-shirt covered in dust, struggled to come to terms with what happened. “When we returned to Shujaiya district, we found immense destruction that defies description. All the houses were demolished,” he said. The assault has now moved to the rest of Gaza City, which the Zionist forces have told residents to evacuate. — AFP