A Gaza City Neighborhood Is Left in Ruins After Israeli Troops Withdraw

After two weeks of intense battles between Hamas militants and Israeli troops in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shajaiye, residents and rescue workers combed through the wreckage on Friday, a landscape of flattened buildings strewed with dozens of bodies.

Residents who returned described a neighborhood that was now uninhabitable.

“Homes are all reduced to piles of rubble, bakeries and shops are destroyed, and even the streets have been dug up,” said Karam Hassan, a resident who had traveled back toShajaiye to see the aftermath of the fighting. “The scale of destruction is immense.”

More than nine months into the war in Gaza, Israeli troops are returning to areas they had previously conquered and encountering strong resistance from Hamas fighters. They say they are also uncovering weapons caches that belong to the militants.

The offensive in Shajaiye was part of a wider Israeli effort to clamp down on a renewed Hamas insurgency in Gaza City, the military said. And Israel said on Friday that it had “eliminated” the deputy commander of Hamas’s Shajaiye Battalion, Ayman Showadeh. He had been “a key operative” at the group’s operations headquarters and had been involved in directing the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack that set off the war in Gaza, Israel said.

Ahmed Sidu, a local resident and photographer who visited the Shajaiye area on Friday, said it had “no shelter and no water.” The Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, said in a statement on Thursday night that its crews had recovered more than 60 bodies from Shajaiye after the Israeli withdrawal. The death toll could not be independently confirmed.

Dozens of people remained missing and were feared to be buried under the rubble, the statement added. The raid had destroyed most of the buildings and houses that were left standing after Israel’s initial invasion in October, it said.