On the morning of 9 October 2023, the Trans area of the open market in Jabaliya refugee camp was bustling. Two days into the Gaza war triggered by Hamas’s surprise attack in Israel, it had yet to be hit by Israeli jets.
The camp, just north of the city of the same name, was established in 1948. Though technically still a refugee camp, in the ensuing decades it had become largely indistinguishable from the rest of northern Gaza’s urban sprawl – densely populated, vibrant and busy. As well as the large open market at its centre, there were restaurants and schools, two football teams, bakeries and clinics.
This footage from 2022 shows people on a packed street in the camp’s main market during Eid al-Fitr celebrations.
Between 10.30am and 11.30am on 9 October last year, five Israeli airstrikes tore through the market, killing dozens of people.
They were the opening salvoes of a devastating Israeli campaign, conducted in three waves, that has left the camp an unrecognisable wasteland of rubble.
“This year is one of the worst I have experienced,” said 33-year-old Ahlam al-Tlouli, who comes from the Tal al-Zaatar area of the camp. “We have lived through destruction, killing, starvation, displacement, fear, terror and siege. Every minute that passes feels like a year.”
Over the course of the Israeli invasion, settlements across the Gaza Strip have suffered damage.
This is the story of the ruin of Jabaliya.
‘We were starving and without food’
The first offensive: October 2023 – January 2024
Jabaliya was pummelled with airstrikes in the first months of the war. The deadliest, on 31 October, killed scores of people and left large craters in the ground at a busy junction.
Israel said the camp was a command centre for Hamas’s northern brigade and that it had identified Hamas tunnel systems under the camp. It told civilians across northern Gaza to head south but many were unable or unwilling to do so.
“My father was at home and could not leave because he was injured and had an amputated leg,” Tlouli said. “Even if we wanted to leave, we didn’t have money to go anywhere or manage our needs.”
On 8 November, Israeli troops entered the camp. Tlouli said that by then all the family apart from her father had taken shelter in schools run by Unrwa, the Palestinian refugee agency. “We took it in turns to come back to the house to check on our father,” she said. “One day when my stepmother was returning to the school, she was killed by snipers. A few days later, my father was also killed by a sniper.”
Tlouli said that as the fighting intensified the family were forced to move from school to school. “We were starving and without food,” she said. “Even when food was available, we didn’t have money to buy it.”
On 12 December Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced that the fighting in Jabaliya had finished, with hundreds of Hamas fighters killed. The IDF said Hamas’s military capabilities had been dismantled. In late January, Israel withdrew from the camp.
‘All the houses were in ruins’
The second offensive: May 2024
Intermittent clashes continued throughout January despite Israeli claims that Hamas had been defeated in Jabaliya. This footage from April shows damage to buildings along two roads in the camp.
On 11 May the IDF reported that Hamas had managed to reconstitute its military capabilities, and it issued a new round of evacuation orders to civilians. Two days later, a full-scale re-invasion began.
Umm Suhaib Siam, a 42-year-old widow and mother of three, was trapped in her home in the Fakhoura district in block 9 when the second offensive began.
Siam recalled the day she decided to risk leaving her house, which had been hit with an artillery shell, injuring her and her children. The family moved to a nearby clinic and stayed there for two days “until we were besieged by the Israeli army”.
She recalled a man appearing with a loudspeaker saying the clinic had to be evacuated as the building was about to be bombed.
“He started showing us the way, talking on the phone, while a quadcopter flew over him. We passed through the centre of the camp next to the main market, along Awda Street to the Khadamat football club.”
By the time Israeli troops had withdrawn three weeks later – once again claiming to have dismantled Hamas – it was reported that 70% of the camp’s buildings had sustained heavy damage. Drone footage filmed in June laid bare the extent of the destruction.
Fakhoura district had the worst destruction. “All the houses were in ruins on the ground,” Siam said. “No house, person, tree or stone was spared.”
‘Jabaliya is like hell’
The third offensive: October 2024 – ongoing
The heavy damage inflicted on Jabaliya during the second offensive paled in comparison with the destruction levelled since 5 October, when Israeli forces returned in large numbers for a third time.
Over the course of the offensive – which targeted Jabaliya city as well as the camp – whole groupings of buildings have been demolished, replaced in some areas by bulldozed lanes to accommodate Israeli armour and tank berms. In some instances houses have been brought down with demolition charges. In footage posted online in recent weeks, bulldozers and backhoes can be seen pulling down structures.
Some neighbourhoods have almost entirely disappeared, including block 4, which included the camp’s main school complex.
“There are bodies on the roads and under the rubble,” said Mahmoud Basal, 39, a civil defence official. “It is total destruction.”
The home of the Khadamat sports club, which was established in 1951 included football, basketball and volleyball teams, had survived previous operations and served for a while as a shelter for the displaced. At some point during the third offensive the football pitch was cleared out and now appears to host several Israeli military vehicles.
Khaled al-Ayla, a 54-year-old university lecturer, said: “The situation in Jabaliya is like hell. Homes are demolished on top of residents … All you see is destruction … There is nothing left. No homes, schools, universities or hospitals. Nothing.”
Sam Rose, a senior deputy director for Unrwa affairs in Gaza, said the latest Israeli operations were “completely different” to previous conflicts in the territory. “This time they are flattening the place … it has become uninhabitable.”
He added: “I’ve been to Yarmouk [the Palestinian camp in Damascus that was heavily destroyed in 2015] but this is 20 times worse. I don’t think [the IDF] has a plan except just to keep going. It has an awful momentum.”
Other observers detect a more deliberate agenda in Jabaliya and across northern Gaza: the slow enactment of a scorched earth policy known as the “generals’ plan”, aimed at driving out civilians from areas by declaring them “closed military zones” where anyone who stays is considered a combatant and all aid and other supplies are cut.
Regardless of the intention, whole-scale destruction of neighbourhoods has taken place across the north of Gaza, including in the camp.
A document circulated to Israeli combat soldiers in recent weeks, revealed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, talks of “exposing large areas” – a euphemism, the paper says, for destroying buildings and infrastructure in such a way that Hamas fighters cannot hide in them but no one can live in them either.
Nadia Hardman, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said HRW had identified a pattern in Jabaliya and across the north of Israeli forces clearing territory for buffer zones and security corridors.
“People can argue whether the campaign of bombing is reckless destruction or part of the hostilities, but taking control of an area and intentionally destroying it looks far more systematic,” Hardman said.
In a statement, the IDF said: “The IDF is currently operating in northern Gaza against terrorist targets due to Hamas’s efforts to restore its operational capabilities in the area … The IDF targets only military objectives. Strikes aimed at military objectives are subject to the relevant international law, including taking all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians.”
Even close Israeli observers are struggling to understand the intensity of the focus on Jabaliya. “It’s a mystery I have been trying to understand myself,” said Michael Milstein, of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. “We all understand this operation doesn’t defeat Hamas, which obviously still exists, even in Jabaliya.”
For Mohammed Nasser, 48, from Tal al-Zahar, who used to work as a television camera operator, it is hard to see what more could be destroyed. “The previous wars did not cause destruction like this,” he said. “Homes, streets, health and educational facilities – everything is gone.”
