Palestinians returned to breathtaking scenes of destruction in the Gaza City district of Shijaiyah after Israeli troops withdrew, ending a two-week offensive there. Civil defense workers said Thursday that so far, they had found the bodies of 60 people in the rubble.
Families who fled the assault ventured back into Shijaiyah to see the condition of their homes or salvage whatever they could.
Nearly every building was flattened to rubble for block after block, leaving giant piles of concrete and twisted rebar. Here and there, grey gutted concrete frames still stood a few stories high. The ever-present buzzing sound of Israeli military drones hung in the hot summer air as people on bicycles or horse-drawn carts made their way over dirt paths where the streets had apparently been bulldozed away.
Sharif Abu Shanab found his family's four-story building collapsed. I can't enter it. I can't take anything out of it, not even a can of tuna. We have nothing, no food or drink, he said.
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