A United Nations all-terrain vehicle lurched along the sandy coastal road in northern Gaza. Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, was filming the landscape through the windscreen: An endless field of ruins, without a single human life, just like an apocalyptic movie scene. "An entire society now a graveyard," she wrote on X, posting her video on November 6.

Her colleague Georgios Petropoulos, who heads the Gaza Strip branch of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), felt the same dread when he visited the enclave's north in early November. "There is no untouched building. The level of destruction is complete. There is no road there is just sand. I've never seen anything like this," he explained over the phone. Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering the coastal territory.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, in October 2023, following the attack perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel, the northern quarter of the coastal territory has been subjected to a different treatment than the rest. The Israeli army ordered its evacuation on October 13, 2023, and has massively bombed it and deprived it of humanitarian aid almost continuously. The North Gaza Governorate – which includes Beit Lahia to the west, Beit Hanoun to the east and Jabalia, home to the strip's largest refugee camp, a little further south – was also the first to have been invaded by the Israeli army, as it started its ground offensive at the end of October 2023. Yet, since October 6, 2024, the attacks this area has suffered are unparalleled in their brutality.

Several hundred killed in one month

In the early hours of the morning, Israeli soldiers ordered the remaining Palestinians present in the area – a population that the United Nations has estimated at 175,000 people – to evacuate. "In less than 24 hours, these areas were besieged and they began storming the schools in which civilians had taken refuge and emptying them," wrote Ayman Lubad, to Le Monde, from the center of the Gaza Strip.

His wife, three children and the rest of his family are still in Beit Lahia. Arrested in December 2023, and then detained in an Israeli army center at which numerous cases of torture have been documented, Lubad, a researcher for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO, was unable to go back to northern Gaza after his release. The 32-year-old father now lives glued to his telephone, with his nerves on edge.

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