LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Palestinians are starting to return to their homes in Gaza now that a temporary ceasefire is in place. Many are finding utter destruction. NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, spent the first half of the war in the southern city of Rafah after being displaced from his home. Then he had to flee again. Yesterday, he returned. NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy has this report on what he found.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Rafah is nothing short of apocalyptic - gray mounds of rubble far as the eye can see and piles of skeletons, where bodies have rotted away.
(SOUNDBITE OF DEBRIS FALLING)
BATRAWY: This is what Palestinians are encountering in Rafah now, a city once teaming with international aid workers and more than a million displaced people. Israeli troops launched a ground offensive against Hamas on Rafah in early May, forcing people to flee. And this week marks the first time Palestinians have been able to safely return.
RIYADH ABU MEHSEN: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: Riyadh Abu Mehsen says his blood's boiling from what's been done to his city, and he's exhausted by the scale of destruction around him. He doesn't think Rafah can ever be rebuilt. NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, says the city and its main road are unrecognizable.
ANAS BABA, BYLINE: Eight months ago, this street was called Paris Street in Rafah. But now it seems that the Israeli bombardment left nothing from this Champs-Elysees of Rafah. We can see that the infrastructure - the streets, roads, water pipes - every single thing that's needs for a human in order to be inhabitant place is lacking here in Rafah.
BATRAWY: Buried below all its rubble are the memories and lives of its people who once lived here. A woman looks with disbelief at the mound of concrete and twisted metal under her feet. This was her home.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
BATRAWY: A man tells her, put your faith in God. Through tears, she repeats (non-English language spoken) - God is sufficient and the best disposer of affairs. Nestled near the border with Egypt, this once-quiet town became a lifeline for Gaza after Hamas-led militants launched an attack on Israel in 2023 that killed 1,200 people there and sparked the war. Rafah became the main entry point for aid into Gaza for the first half of the war and hosted Palestinians from bigger cities. But Rafah was never safe. Out of the more than 47,000 Palestinians killed in the war, according to Gaza's health ministry, thousands were buried here in Rafah.
This is what it sounded like at the main hospital's morgue in Rafah in the first months of war. Here, a distraught man fell to his knees, surrounded by the bodies of his relatives covered in white shrouds.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
BATRAWY: In those first months of the war, NPR reported on many of these deaths from the Abu Youssef al-Najjar morgue, documenting entire families killed in Israeli airstrikes. The military either would not comment on specific strikes or would attribute them to its aims of dismantling Hamas, which it accused of using civilians for cover. The al-Najjar Hospital today, like much of Gaza, is a charred shell of itself. There's only debris where its departments once pulsed with life. But there is one bulldozer outside carefully, slowly working through the rubble. Osama Ali, a manager at the hospital, says he spent 17 years working in its wards.
OSAMA ALI: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: He says, "we don't know how to come out of this. The situation is very hard." He says he doesn't know how to express how he feels inside seeing Rafah and the hospital like this.
ALI: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: Rafah was a battleground between Hamas and Israel for the past eight months. Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar here in October. He was the mastermind of the October 7 attack on Israel.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR ENGINES RUMBLING)
BATRAWY: Since the ceasefires started Sunday, people have been making their way back to Rafah and other parts of Gaza. But their nightmare is far from over. There are losses here of lives and homes that can never be put back together.
(SOUNDBITE OF DEBRIS FALLING)
BATRAWY: In one destroyed home in Rafah, a boy dusts the debris off a golden-colored curtain stitched with flowers. The road to recovery here is long, but for some, it has already begun.
Aya Batrawy, NPR News, Dubai with Anas Baba in Gaza.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEEZY PRIME AND MARSQUAKE'S "BLURRED VISIONS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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