Beit Hanoun is not only dead. Beit Hanoun no longer exists. The Northern Gaza town, with a pre-war population of 35,000, has been crushed by the intensive bombardments of the Israeli army, which has shown no intention of passing them off as surgical strikes. Following Hamas's attack on October 7, when the group's fighters from the enclave – and Beit Hanoun, notably – triggered the war by massacring 1,400 people in the nearby Israeli kibbutzim and towns, the Israeli army began its offensive with several weeks of bombing. Then, its troops advanced into the Palestinian territory from the north, while others moved from the center, to encircle Gaza City. Beit Hanoun was one of the first targets of Israel's bombardments, and was then the scene of fighting to drive out Hamas.

In the massive dump of rubble that has replaced the city, everything is now shattered. What remains are sections of walls, sometimes bearing now-derisory inscriptions to the glory of Hamas and its fighters, surrounded by twisted pieces of steel and mountains of debris, which the D9 armored bulldozers tasked with reopening the routes in the ruins loudly push around like big mammoths.

The trees seem to have been thrown to the ground by an end-of-time storm, their trunks chewed up and digested by the bombardment. Explosions continue to ring between the hollowed-out buildings. Israeli soldiers weave their way through the rubble, jumping on pieces of houses or sinking ankle-deep into the soft dust that seems, everywhere, to have taken revenge on the solidity of the built environment. Tanks peeking from behind the ruins open fire, explosions resound nearby, machine guns strafe, fires are lit, smoke rises.

'We blow everything up'

The war, in reality, has already moved. The tank fire means that the areas where Hamas fighters were supposed to be operating are not far away, but no longer directly threaten this sector. "We find explosives, booby traps, in almost every other house. So we blow everything up to prevent our men from being trapped," says a soldier wearing shatterproof glasses.

The turret of a tank swivels before firing a shell to the south, in the direction of the battle taking place, at the same time, in the heart of Gaza City, a denser urban area with taller buildings, of which Beit Hanoun was a peripheral element. Israeli army units are moving forward. Here, there is no question of a ceasefire. This idea makes Israeli soldiers gag in Beit Hanoun, where several of their comrades have died. The rolling fire continues. "It's the sound of war," says Colonel Ivri Elbaz, commander of the 12^th Negev Brigade, which took part in the fighting to take control of the area a few days ago. Elbaz did not have permission to comment on the details of those operations.

You have 70% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.