Posted on 06/19/24
| News Source: JPost
A white cat walking across a partially destroyed building in Rafah’s Shabura refugee camp was the only civilian remnant of the Gaza neighborhood by the Egyptian border, which until the start of May had been crowded with Palestinians.
A bullet-riddled Sonol sign still hung on top of the rubble of what had once been a gas station.
Half destroyed concrete buildings stood, in some cases reduced to framed shells, intermixed with piles of rubble.
Large swaths of sand, covered what had once been paved roads, giving Shabura a dustbowl appearance.
The IDF brought a small number of reporters in a Humvee into this desert landscape on Tuesday, to speak with Nahal Brigade Commander Colonel Yair Zuckerman about the extent to which Hamas has integrated itself into the civilian area.
Just one week earlier, four IDF soldiers were killed when a bobby-trapped building exploded in this neighborhood. Now, however, an empty silence hung heavy under the bright afternoon sun, broken only by the soldiers on the road and the nearby tanks and tractors.
Zuckerman met with reporters on what he said was the 41st day of the battle for Rafah, in one of the more intact buildings in the neighborhood, whose occupants had fled.