Palestinians returned to scenes of destruction in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaiya this week, after Israeli troops ended a two-week-long raid targeting operatives of the Hamas terror group and its extensive tunnel network.

Families who fled the assault ventured back into Shejaiya 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.

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.

Since fleeing the district, his family has been sleeping in the streets, he said.

“Where do we go and to whom? … We have no home or anything,” he said in despair. “There’s only one solution, hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”

The ever-present buzzing sound of IDF 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.

The IDF announced in a statement Wednesday evening that its operations in Shejaiya had ended, saying forces had killed more than 150 gunmen and demolished eight tunnels.

The two-week operation in Shejiaya sent 80,000 people fleeing the neighborhood, most into nearby areas, and it is not known how many people remained in the district during the fighting.

Israel has been at war with Hamas since October 7 of last year, when thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.

Gaza’s civil defense organization, part of the enclave’s Hamas government, said that amid the ongoing fighting, its emergency crews had largely been unable to respond to calls for help from residents in destroyed buildings.

After the Israeli troops withdrew from the area, Gazan crews entered and recovered 60 bodies, it said, adding that the search was ongoing. The figure could not be independently verified.

More bodies were believed buried under rubble, but the organization has little heavy equipment to clear debris.

The United Nations estimated earlier this week that about 300,000 Palestinians were still in northern Gaza, after much of the population of 2.3 million people left earlier in the war.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.

Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 326.