Palestinians have begun returning to the devastated city of Khan Younis, a day after Israel’s unexpected withdrawal of forces from southern Gaza.
Those returning to the city, which has been under a relentless Israeli military assault for the past four months, described widespread destruction and the stench of death from under the rubble.
The retreat of Israel’s 98th division from southern Gaza, on the day that marked the six-month anniversary of the war, baffled many Israeli commentators, who struggled to interpret official explanations for the previously unannounced move.
The departure of the forces leaves only two Israeli brigades inside tasked Gaza with maintaining the physical separation of the northern and southern halvesof the strip.
Although senior Israeli military and political officials insisted the withdrawal did not mark the end of the conflict or the postponement of Israel’s threatened assault on the city of Rafah, it came alongside conflicting messages of progress from ceasefire talks in Cairo over the weekend, with some describing significant progress.
Video from the Associated Press in Khan Younis showed some people returning to a landscape marked by shattered multi-storey buildings and climbing over debris. Cars were overturned and charred. Southern Gaza’s main hospital, Nasser, was in shambles.
“Many areas, especially the city centre, have become unfit for life,” said Mahmoud Abdel-Ghani, who fled Khan Younis in December when Israel began its ground invasion of the city. “I found that my house and my neighbours’ houses turned to rubble.”
Some returned carrying belongings or cycled on demolished roads to inspect the damage. “It’s all just rubble,” said Ahmad Abu al-Rish. “Animals can’t live here, so how is a human supposed to?”
Najwa Ayyash, who also was displaced from Khan Younis, said she was unable to reach her family’s third-floor apartment because the stairs were gone. Her brother climbed his way up through the destruction and pulled down some possessions, including lighter clothes for her children.
Bassel Abu Nasser, a Khan Younis resident who fled after an airstrike hit his home in January, said much of the city had been turned into rubble. “There is no sense of life there,” the 37-year-old father of two children said. “They left nothing there.”
Others suggested that even returning to badly damaged apartments was better than remaining in a tent in Rafah.
While the Israel’s military said its withdrawal of forces from southern Gaza was merely a regrouping as the army prepares to move into Hamas’s last stronghold, Rafah, the claim was met with some scepticism by Israeli commentators who saw little evidence of Israeli preparations for a Rafah offensive or for the evacuation of the 1.4 million Palestinians in the city.
Israel has told the Biden administration – which opposes an assault on the city – that it plans to relocate those sheltering in Rafah to satellite tent cities, but there appear to be no preparations for that move.
Instead, critics of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claim he is content to continue the war at a far lower intensity and tempo to prolong the conflict and his own political survival.
Justifying the move, the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Gen Herzi Halevi, said: “The war in Gaza continues, and we are far from stopping. Senior Hamas officials are still in hiding. We will get to them sooner or later. We are making progress, continuing to kill more terrorists and commanders and destroy more terror infrastructures, including last night.”
However, the move sparked alarm among far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition and newspaper commentators.
On Monday, Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, warned that “if Netanyahu decides to end the war without an expansive assault in Rafah, he won’t have the mandate to serve as prime minister”.
That sentiment was echoed by his far-right colleague Bezalel Smotrich, who called an immediate security cabinet meeting to discuss the progress of the war “given the given situation of pulling out of forces from the Gaza Strip and the decreasing of the war’s general intensity, while delaying for weeks the entry to Rafah”.
Writing in the rightwing Jerusalem Post, the paper’s senior military correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob described the move as “stunning”.
“Some political and defence officials tried to offer apologetics for how it was hinted to [be], or consistent with Israel’s strategy to date – but it simply was not,” he said, describing it as an “admission of failure” in its policy of trying to pressure Hamas to release hostages through the large presence of Israeli forces in the south.
Even Israel Hayom, which for years existed as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, struggled to believe the official explanation suggesting the withdrawal might be a precursor to a hostages-for-ceasefire deal.
“If we assemble all the pieces of the puzzle that is Israel’s moves in the past day,” wrote Ariel Kahana, “it looks like a final, large and very dangerous and difficult effort to reach a hostage deal is being made”.
Depictions of progress in ceasefire talks over the weekend were categorised by wildly different assessments, with a Hamas official saying on Monday no progress was made, shortly after Egyptian sources said headway had been made on the agenda.
“There is no change in the position of the occupation and therefore, there is nothing new in the Cairo talks,” the Hamas official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “There is no progress yet.”
Earlier on Monday, Egypt’s state-affiliated Al-Qahera News TV channel quoted a senior Egyptian source as saying progress had been made after a deal was reached among participating delegations on issues under discussion.
In Jerusalem at the weekend, the Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, described the Cairo talks as the closest the sides had come to a deal since a November truce under which Hamas freed dozens of hostages.
“We have reached a critical point in the negotiations. If it works out, then a large number of hostages will come home,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
Agencies contributed to this article