Israeli bombardment tears the heart out of Gaza’s cultural hub

Gaza City: Collapsed buildings, mangled infrastructure, streets turned into fields of rubble.

Scenes of violence and destruction in the long-blockaded Gaza Strip have filled the world’s airwaves throughout four wars and countless rounds of hostilities between Israel and Hamas militants. But this conflict, Palestinians say, is different.

Injured civilians wait for treatment following Israeli airstrikes in the Rimal district of Gaza City.Credit: Bloomberg

On Tuesday, after a night of intense bombardment, residents were struggling to grasp the sheer scale of damage inflicted on Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighbourhood, along with its shopping malls, restaurants, residential buildings and offices belonging to aid groups and international media far from the territory’s hard-hit border towns and impoverished refugee camps.

Israel has hit Rimal, also home to Hamas government ministries, in the 2021 war, but never like this.

Israeli bombs blew out walls and ripped off roofs of upper-class apartment towers. They toppled trees that had lined the sidewalks. They uprooted streets that had teemed with businessmen hustling to work and vendors hawking roasted nuts.

They levelled mosques and university buildings and wrecked high-rise offices of companies and organisations like Gaza’s main telecommunications company and bar association.

A relentless bombing campaign has flattened parts of Gaza City, including in Rimal.Credit: Bloomberg

Among those broad boulevards full of beauty salons, falafel shops and pizzerias beat the heart of Gaza City. For many, the magnitude of the devastation there, affecting the territory’s middle and upper classes, had symbolic significance.

“Israel has destroyed the centre of everything,” said Palestinian businessman Ali al-Hiyak from his home near Rimal. “That is the space of our public life, our community ... They are breaking us.”

After Gaza’s Hamas rulers mounted the deadliest attack on Israel in decades, killing more than 1000 people and taking dozens more hostage in a multi-pronged offensive, Israel unleashed what Gaza residents described as the most intense bombing campaign in recent memory, with hundreds of airstrikes.

“These sounds are different,” 30-year-old Saman Ashour in Gaza City texted as she lay awake in a neighbourhood north of Rimal, listening to the roar of explosions. “It’s the sound of revenge.”

Residents said the Israeli military struck some buildings without first firing warning missiles as a precaution. The civilian death toll has been rapidly rising.

Overall, Gaza health officials have reported the airstrikes have killed more than 800 people and wounded thousands more. Israel has also cut off Gaza’s water supplies and electricity, worsening the territory’s already abysmal humanitarian conditions.

The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, said that Israel was trying to “evacuate civilian populations from areas where Hamas has a military presence” before unleashing “powerful destruction”.

That tactic is evident from staggering drone footage that shows vast swaths of central Gaza City reduced to nothing but dirt craters and ruins from demolished buildings.

Most Palestinian civilians did not evacuate. There are no bomb shelters. Israel and Egypt tightly control the enclave’s borders and have not let anyone out. UN shelters are rapidly filling up.

After the militant group’s unprecedented attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers, which stunned and terrorised a country long seen as invincible, analysts said it was clear the group bet all of its chips no matter the consequences. Israel was now waging a war not to repel Hamas, like in past rounds, but to destroy it.

“The strategic prospect is to annihilate, destroy and demolish the military capacity of Hamas,” said Kobi Michael, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank. “Hamas brought this on the heads of the Gazans.”

“If Israel is not aggressive enough,” he added, “that will only drag us to another front and to another conflict.”

But Palestinians in Gaza see the Israeli military’s wrath as collective punishment.

A medic treats an injured child after Israeli airstrikes in the Rimal district of Gaza City.Credit: Bloomberg

“We’re talking about damage to hospitals that can’t even run without fuel, the total demolition of homes and infrastructure,” said Iyad Bozum, spokesman for Gaza’s Interior Ministry. “At the end of this there will be nothing left to even reconstruct. It will be impossible to live here.”

The strikes on Rimal killed ordinary residents like shopkeepers and local journalists and destroyed dozens of homes.

Issa Abu Salim, 60, was seething as he stood amid the debris of his home, his clothes filthy with the dust of the destruction.

“Our money is gone. My identity cards are lost. The entire house, all four floors, is lost,” he said. “The most beautiful area, they destroyed it.”

Destroyed buildings and residential towers in the Rimal district.Credit: Bloomberg

AP

More coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• Surprise attack: Hamas terrorists fired up to 5000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on October 7, triggering a declaration of war. Read our guide to the militant group and why it’s at war with Israel.
• The Iron Dome explained: How did Hamas breach Israel’s sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system? And why didn’t Israel’s intelligence services see these attacks coming?
• Tragedy in Israel: A 66-year-old Sydney woman has been killed and is the first known Australian casualty. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says the woman’s family in Israel and Australia is receiving consular assistance.
• What’s next: International editor Peter Hartcher joins the Please Explain podcast to analyse the escalating conflict in the Gaza Strip - and explain why a much bigger conflict is afoot.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.