Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post

Visual analysis and interviews show how Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the north as the Israeli military cuts a new corridor through Gaza.

By Miriam Berger, Imogen Piper, Hazem Balousha and Evan Hill

Israel is carrying out mass demolitions and erecting military fortifications in residential areas of northern Gaza where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes, according to satellite imagery, verified videos and interviews.

​​The Israel Defense Forces said that it launched an Oct. 5 air and ground assault in the northernmost parts of Gaza — Jabalya, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun — to oust Hamas militants who had regrouped there and that the operation would “continue as long as necessary.”

More than 100,000 Palestinians have been driven from the affected areas over the past 11 weeks, according to the United Nations, leaving an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 people — less than an eighth of the prewar population. Hardly any aid has reached the area since the beginning of October due to Israeli restrictions, humanitarian groups say, and experts warn that famine may have already taken hold in some places.

As areas are emptied of Palestinians, Israeli forces have demolished entire neighborhoods, established military fortifications and built new roads, according to a Washington Post analysis of high-resolution satellite images. The visual evidence shows almost half of Jabalya refugee camp was demolished or cleared between Oct. 14 and Dec. 15, connecting a preexisting road in the west to an expanded vehicle track in the east — carving out a military axis that stretches from the sea to the border fence with Israel.

The establishment of this corridor, the clearing of tracts of land on either side of it and the construction of square-shaped protected outposts resemble the IDF’s transformation of the Netzarim Corridor, a strategic Israeli military zone in the center of Gaza, analysts said. While Israeli forces cut the Netzarim Corridor through a lightly populated, largely agricultural area, Israel’s operations in the north are centered in dense urban neighborhoods — effectively destroying northern Palestinian cities.

While the military has given no public explanation for its clearing and fortifying activities in the north, analysts said the newly created axis could separate the far north from Gaza City, allowing Israel to create a buffer zone to further insulate its southern communities that were attacked on Oct. 7, 2023.

The IDF has issued evacuation orders as the offensive has unfolded, telling civilians to flee for their own safety, with no sense of when — or if — they will be allowed back. Hamas’s demand that families be permitted to return to the north, beyond the Netzarim Corridor, during any pause in fighting remains a key sticking point in negotiations with Israel over a possible ceasefire and hostage-release deal.

The IDF did not answer specific questions about The Post’s findings. In a general statement, the military said that it is going after “military targets exclusively” and that it “takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians,” including telling them to evacuate “areas of heavy fighting.”

David Mencer, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said this month that “as long as those anti-terror operations are ongoing, we will not allow residents to move back, because we know that the purpose of them moving back is simply so that they are used as human shields by the terrorists.” He denied that the operations were aimed at cutting off the north or expelling Palestinians.

As of Dec. 1, a third of all buildings across the North Gaza governorate had been destroyed since the beginning of the war — including more than 5,000 in Jabalya, more than 3,000 in Beit Lahia and more than 2,000 in Beit Hanoun, according to the latest data from the U.N. Satellite Center. Sixty percent of the destruction in the Jabalya refugee camp took place between Sept. 6 and Dec. 1, the data showed, and the demolitions and displacement have continued in the weeks since.

A satellite image taken Dec. 15 shows widespread devastation across Beit Lahia and Jabalya, with a market, mosque, shops and homes flattened into heaps of concrete and dust. On Dec. 4, the Israeli military forced 5,500 people sheltering in schools in Beit Lahia to flee south to Gaza City, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.

Earlier this month, former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon told local media in interviews that the IDF was carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in northern Gaza. “Beit Lahia no longer exists, Beit Hanoun no longer exists, and now they are working on Jabalya,” he said.

The IDF denied Ya’alon’s claims and said its operations in Gaza were being conducted “in accordance with international law.”

In interviews conducted by phone and text message over multiple weeks, 10 northern Gaza residents described to The Post the widespread targeting of civilian neighborhoods by Israeli forces, dangerous mass evacuations where men and teenage boys were separated from women and children, as well as the abuse and arbitrary detention of some of those trying to flee. Their accounts were consistent with photos and videos verified by The Post of mass screenings and arrests, as well as attacks on civilians.

​​“In northern Gaza, there is nothing left that sustains life,” said Beit Lahia resident Said Kilani, 41. “Everything has been destroyed to force people out.”

A desperate escape

Residents of northern Gaza described the days after Oct. 5 as “doomsday.”

The airstrikes and sniper drones were relentless, said Jabalya resident Mohammed Khdour, 30.​​ They were “the hardest days in the war,” he told The Post by phone.

About 1.9 million people — some 90 percent of Gaza’s population — had already been displaced over more than a year of fighting, most forced to the south during the chaotic early days of the war and prevented from returning home.

Now, those who had ridden out the violence and deprivation in communities closest to the northern border with Israel were being systematically squeezed out, neighborhood by neighborhood, in one of the largest mass displacements since the beginning of the conflict. Residents uniformly told The Post they had never intended to leave and fled only when they felt certain they would die or be killed in their homes.

Khdour feared he would be shot if he ventured out, he said. But the damaged apartment he was staying in with his brother, Mowafak, and his 2-year-old nephew offered little protection.

The three had been moving together since December 2023, when a strike on the family home tore up Mowafak’s arm and killed his wife and daughter.

​​This has been the IDF’s third major Jabalya operation of the war, which began Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas militants swept across southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 250 hostages. The IDF says more than 380 soldiers have been killed in Gaza during the war.

Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 107,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

In the first three weeks of the IDF’s new offensive in the north, more than 1,000 people were killed, the health ministry estimated, adding it was probably an undercount with so many bodies still on the streets or buried under rubble. Gaza’s civil defense service said on Oct. 23 it could no longer operate safely there, leaving the area without ambulances or rescue workers.

All the while, residents said civilian homes and residential blocks were targeted repeatedly by Israeli forces. Visual evidence verified by The Post showed the aftermath of strikes on people who had lined up for water and on schools where displaced families were sheltering.

A five-story building in Beit Lahia housed the extended Abu Nasr clan, with three displaced families in each of its 10 apartments, according to 24-year-old Narmeen.

​​Early on Oct. 29, an Israeli airstrike sent the building toppling down. Narmeen, her husband, Mohammed, and their three young children were on the ground floor and survived. Racing to save others, they found “loved ones and relatives cut apart and torn to shreds,” Narmeen wrote in a WhatsApp message.

​​More than 125 members of the family, including two dozen children, were killed, according to a handwritten list she shared with The Post.

The IDF said the next day that it had been targeting a spotter with binoculars on the roof. Weeks later, the military said the strike was among 16 mass casualty incidents in northern Gaza being investigated internally due to a “suspicion of legal violations.”

Narmeen said the family spent two days burying the dead. She now had 10 injured children under her care.

​​“We decided to preserve the small remaining parts of the family,” she said, “and flee.”

As the violence raged, the IDF dropped leaflets, called phones, posted maps online and sent out drones with recorded messages urging people to leave using a designated evacuation route, residents told The Post.

Satellite imagery from Oct. 24 shows two dozen military vehicles positioned near the Indonesian Hospital, one of the area’s main medical facilities, along the route civilians were told to take, and around two nearby schools — among the locations where evacuees said soldiers systematically separated men and teenage boys from women and children for screenings. Palestinians described passing in front of cameras that scanned their faces.

​​“We walked in the middle of the bombings, in the middle of the shooting,” said a 55-year-old doctor, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Israeli forces.

​​The doctor said bodies lined the streets on the road to Kamal Adwan Hospital, where he worked for two weeks. The facility was overwhelmed with patients and running out of basic supplies, he said.

On Oct. 22, he and his family joined a procession of thousands of Palestinians heading farther south.

​​The process took hours, evacuees told The Post: Women and children were typically cleared first and directed to keep moving, witnesses said, and were not allowed to wait for male family members. Men described waiting anxiously to see if they would be detained or allowed to pass.

​​As the doctor and his 16-year-old son sat in a holding ditch, he recounted seeing men stripped down and three truckloads of blindfolded detainees in white uniforms being driven away. “Will they bury us here?” he remembered his son asking.

On Nov. 17, Wassim Kholief, 22, took the designated evacuation route from his home in Beit Lahia. By then, he told The Post by WhatsApp, “most of my neighbors had been killed.”

He said he was forced to undergo a screening at “what was essentially a military site,” where men sat on the ground for hours with their identification cards raised.

Kholief said he was “beaten and mocked” by a soldier who filmed the humiliating encounter. Before releasing him, he said, the IDF seized his only bag of belongings.

The IDF did not respond directly to the claims of abuse but said in a statement that “allegations of irregular incidents” will be referred for investigation. On its screening practices, it said “individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activities are detained and interrogated” and released if “found not to be involved.”

Fearing the checkpoints, some residents tried alternative routes out of Jabalya. One western exit involved crossing the Abu Shreikh roundabout, which became known as the “roundabout of death” because of Israeli snipers.

​​Kholief, the doctor and his son, as well as the Khdour and Abu Nasr families, all eventually reached neighborhoods in or around Gaza City, where most evacuees have settled. Shelters there are overflowing.

​​Khdour and his brother were among the few who decided to keep moving, crossing into the south in early November, motivated by the long-shot hope of getting Mowafak specialized medical treatment abroad.

​​It was a “fateful decision,” Khdour said. “You cannot return ever.”

A growing military footprint

The destruction, displacement and denial of aid in the region resemble the “General’s Plan,” a siege proposal presented to the Israeli government by a former IDF commander that calls for the military to take control of the north by starving out the civilian population and treating anyone who remains as a combatant.

After the United States expressed public concern over the plan, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer wrote in a letter to the Biden administration that reports the strategy was being implemented were “completely false.”

The officials added that Israel “has no policy of forced evacuation of civilians from anywhere in the Gaza Strip, including northern Gaza.”

The next day, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters that “we have not seen” forced displacement of Palestinians. “That certainly would be a red line for the secretary and a red line for us,” he said.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told army radio on Dec. 2 that he was “in favor of occupying territories in Gaza,” “encouraging voluntary immigration” among Palestinians and reestablishing Israeli settlements: “I am seriously considering moving my family to the Gaza Strip,” he said.

​​The IDF has made no public statements about its plans for depopulated parts of northern Gaza, but satellite imagery shows it is dramatically reshaping the geography of the border area through demolitions and fortifications — consistent with the tactics it used to carve out militarized buffer zones in other parts of the Strip, including the central Netzarim Corridor and the Philadelphi Corridor along the border with Egypt.

The Dec. 1 data from the U.N. Satellite Center showed that 5,340 buildings had been destroyed across Jabalya since the start of the war, with 40 percent of the destruction concentrated in the city’s refugee camp. More than 3,600 buildings had been destroyed in Beit Lahia. The pace of destruction has been at its highest during the new Israeli offensive, the data shows.

Satellite imagery from Oct. 11 onward shows large swaths of these same areas have now been built up with military fortifications, including a network of raised protective berms made of upturned earth. By the end of October, they were providing cover for nearly 150 military vehicles encircling Jabalya.

​​William Goodhind, an analyst at Contested Ground, an independent research project that tracks military movements through satellite imagery in conflict zones around the world, said these berms allow Israeli forces to “maneuver through main supply routes with improved security and therefore greater freedom.”

​​New clearings and demolitions over the past two months were concentrated in the south of Jabalya, flattening almost half of the camp, including the main market area, which was visibly destroyed between Oct. 24 and Nov. 12. In the latest satellite imagery from Dec. 15, a new vehicle track is visible zigzagging through the rubble of the camp, connecting al-Bahr Street, which stretches west to the sea, with a road that has recently been expanded and fortified by the IDF — stretching east to the Israeli border.

This new military axis, cutting through the heart of what were once densely populated Palestinian cities, “effectively segments Gaza so that more systematic clearance operations can begin while a de facto border locks down movement to the south,” Goodhind said.

“It is likely this is part of a wider military objective of creating a defensive line across Gaza and bringing the northern territories under Israeli military control,” he added.

Amir Avivi, a former deputy commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, confirmed that the military has opened a new east-west road south of Jabalya to provide “logistical channels” but said it does not represent “a long-term policy.”

On Tuesday, though, Katz said that even after Hamas is defeated, the Israeli military “will assume security control in Gaza” with “full freedom to act,” just as it does in the occupied West Bank.

The latest satellite imagery shows Israel’s demolition campaign continues to expand. A massive increase in destruction was visible in Beit Lahia between Nov. 12 and Dec. 15, and parts of the city’s main cemetery had been flattened by military vehicles.

By Loveday Morris, Sarah Cahlan, Jonathan Baran and Louisa Loveluck

As their unit withdrew from northern Gaza late last year, Israeli reservists from the Negev Brigade’s Battalion 9208 blasted what was once a residential area with tank shells and machine gun fire.

A soldier from the unit posted a video of the four-minute bombardment to Facebook. “A farewell barrage,” read the Facebook post, accompanied by four fire emojis.

“From here on out, anyone who wants to mess with us will understand that this will be the outcome,” warns a voice across the communication system in the video before giving the order to fire.

In the 14 months since the Israeli military launched its invasion of Gaza, videos and photographs have repeatedly shown its forces demolishing entire buildings, including homes and schools, as well as looting and torching them. Other visuals have Israeli soldiers posing next to dead bodies and calling for the extermination and expulsion of Palestinians. Running through many of these images is the theme of exacting revenge on Gaza for the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the bloodiest day in Israel’s history — with Hamas posting videos of atrocities committed by its fighters in attacks on Israeli civilians.

Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of photos and videos from the battlefield, recording their actions in the war and broadcasting them on social media. Though the Israel Defense Forces have ordered troops not to film and post “revenge” videos, they have continued to appear online throughout the war. The result is a vast cache that gives a rare and troubling view of how some elements of the Israeli military have conducted themselves during one of the most deadly and destructive wars in recent memory.

The Washington Post verified more than 120 photos and videos of the war in Gaza posted between October 2023 and October 2024, most of which were recorded by soldiers or shared publicly on their personal social media accounts. They show soldiers blowing up or setting fire to buildings — and often celebrating the destruction — occupying destroyed buildings, mocking Palestinians and calling for the Israeli resettlement of Gaza. The Post also interviewed seven soldiers about their experiences in Gaza and examined public comments by commanders.

The military has tried to clamp down on controversial videos amid concerns they could contribute to ongoing investigations of Israel at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. In a letter to commanders in February, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi urged soldiers not to loot or “shoot revenge videos.”

Fewer public posts with such images have appeared online in recent months. But new examples continue to emerge.

Some soldiers who spoke to The Post said the actions of fellow soldiers had made them uncomfortable. Yuval Green, a 26-year-old military medic who was deployed to Khan Younis for two months in December, said he had encountered soldiers who were driven by a sense of religious fanaticism or the desire for retribution. Often, they had known people killed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7.

Those motivations “told them they had to ruin Gaza, they had to create damage,” he said, adding that actions were supposed to serve a military purpose but it “all gets mixed up” with the emotion.

That was echoed by Michael Ziv, 29, who served as a reservist in the Jerusalem Brigade attached to a unit stationed on the Netzarim Corridor, the dividing line that carves Gaza in two. “You feel this very, very strong sense of revenge from everybody,” he said.

The discipline system that is supposed to hold soldiers accountable “just does not kick in,” he said. Both Ziv and Green have said they would not return to military service in Gaza after the behavior they witnessed there as soldiers. Green said he was speaking out against the army’s conduct, in part, because he believed that support for such behavior, was as damaging as support for the violence of Hamas militants.

Legal experts who reviewed videos compiled by The Post said in the most egregious cases soldiers are effectively logging evidence of possible violations of international humanitarian law.

Among the concerns the videos raise is a disproportionate destruction of civilian infrastructure, said Chantal Meloni, a law professor at the University of Milan and adviser on international crimes at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who reviewed visuals at The Post’s request. Israel and the United States assert Hamas has taken shelter among Palestinians in many residential areas, which Israel has cited as a justification for strikes that have resulted in high civilian death tolls.

Many individual soldiers who posted videos and photos on social media did not respond or declined requests for comment. But some were unapologetic or said they didn’t think soldiers were mocking or humiliating anyone. Shimon Zuckerman, a soldier who posted videos showing the detonations of at least a couple dozen buildings in Gaza last year, said the army had told him to stop posting online earlier this year.

“I took these videos to raise the morale of the people at home, and I don’t regret it for a moment,” he said.

BURNING HOMES

The Post verified multiple videos and photos that showed soldiers setting buildings on fire or posing in front of houses in flames, incidents that spanned from Beit Hanoun in the north to Khan Younis in the south.

The visual evidence is consistent with testimony from soldiers who described, in separate incidents, being instructed to burn private homes and from Palestinians who say they have returned to their neighborhoods to find apartments torched.

“We would leave a house and they told us when we came out of it, to burn it down,” said Green. When he asked his commander about the purpose of the policy, Green recounted, he was told it was because military equipment left behind by soldiers could give information to the enemy.

“A bit of gasoline on those mattresses, and they will burn out,” Green said, describing how soldiers set the fires. “It will take time, but everything burns out.”

He told his commander that if the burning continued, he’d leave. “And I left the next day,” he said.

Another 22-year-old soldier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal from Israeli authorities, explained in detail how soldiers would set houses alight, a practice he said took place “from the beginning” of the war.

“Every house with Hamas signs, we were told to burn,” he said. “But Hamas is the main power in Gaza. Most of the houses have the Hamas flag, a photo of Haniyeh,” he said, referring to Ismail Haniyeh, one of Hamas’s former political officials who was assassinated by Israel in July. In houses that had photos of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who died two decades ago, soldiers had “the option” to burn them down, he said, adding that his unit set fire to at least twenty homes over the course of his five month deployment.

The IDF said “there is at times a military necessity to operate in buildings where the terrorist organization has placed its infrastructure.” It added that “the burning of buildings without a military necessity is contrary to the IDF orders and the values of the IDF” and such incidents would be reviewed and addressed.

Soldiers would pile up furniture in the middle of a room, douse it with flammables and set it alight, he said, starting on the top floors and working their way down. “They just had lots of fun from doing it,” he said. “When you’ve spent so much time there, you stop thinking about the Palestinians who live in this house, and the Palestinians who will live there in the future.”

One video posted in February shows a house burning from the inside. “Everything will burn,” someone says off camera, adding that the location was a “terrorist’s house” in the “heart of Khan Younis.”

When asked if the burning of civilian homes is permitted in Gaza, the IDF said that it carries out demolitions of “Hamas infrastructure and other military targets using approved and appropriate means.”

“Allegations of conduct that do not fall within IDF approved directives and protocols will be reviewed,” it said.

DESTRUCTION

Over the past year, large swaths of Gaza have been reduced to rubble, both through punishing airstrikes and demolitions carried out by ground forces, aided by Israel’s hulking armored bulldozers.

“There’s only one solution to Gaza,” said one soldier in a video posted in January, before the multi-story building behind him exploded in a cloud of dust.

More than 66 percent of structures in Gaza have been damaged, including an estimated 227,591 homes, according to a U.N. satellite assessment published Sept. 29.

Zuckerman, who is part of an IDF engineering crew tasked with controlled explosions, said that the buildings were only blown up if they were booby trapped or were deemed “terrorist infrastructure.”

But other soldiers who spoke to The Post said they often didn’t understand the military purpose of the detonations. “Even when it was next to us, I was never able to know why it was done,” said Green, who also described arguments with platoon mates who he said left graffiti in private homes and destroyed families’ personal belongings.

Other visuals verified by The Post show soldiers setting up camp in abandoned homes, vandalizing property and posing for pictures with undergarments stolen from Palestinian women. In some, soldiers made light of the widespread destruction.

Half a dozen videos verified by The Post show soldiers knocking on doors or ringing doorbells, turning to ask the camera where everyone is, then zooming out to show the house has been destroyed.

In others, soldiers give satirical guided tours of gutted and graffitied buildings. In a post from October, a soldier Erel Nistel posted a photo of himself holding a banner for the real estate firm where he works in front of a destroyed house. The caption read: “New for sale exclusively Nusierat, refugee camp” and “expecting construction evacuation.” Nistel, who had several friends die in the Oct. 7 attack, told The Post the visuals were “purely a marketing concept to generate interest and buzz” and not taken and shared “out of revenge.”

The IDF did not comment on whether the detonations and destruction breached IDF guidelines or give details of any specific military necessity in the examples provided by The Post.

In some cases, troops dedicated explosions to loved ones killed on Oct. 7, or tied the devastation to their own personal losses.

“Keep watching us from above and we will avenge from below,” Elishav Libman, a soldier whose brother was one of hundreds killed at the Nova music festival, posted in October along with a video filmed out of a vehicle window showing the devastation on Gaza’s streets. In another, graffiti had been scrawled on a wall: “We demand revenge,” it said.

When he was first deployed to Gaza, Libman had thought his brother had been kidnapped, with the family only getting confirmation that the 23-year-old had been killed seven months later. He said he didn’t act in Gaza on a personal “vendetta.”

“Ultimately, my target audience is the citizens of Israel,” he told The Post of the graffiti. “I know what gives our citizens strength.”

INTERNATIONAL LAW

Some videos shot by IDF soldiers have already been used by South Africa in its genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. It could take years for a final ruling to come down.

Experts say that videos that depict the mistreatment of detainees and corpses also raise concerns under international law.

In early December, large groups of Palestinian men were rounded up in a mass arrest in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia. The detentions were documented in several videos.

In one, more than 100 Palestinians kneel in the road with their hands behind their heads in the winter cold. An Israeli soldier tells the men that the IDF is “demolishing Gaza” and working to occupy all of it. “This is what you want? Do you want Hamas with you?” he admonishes over a bullhorn.

The video is “particularly egregious,” said Mark Ellis, an international criminal law expert and the executive director of the International Bar Association, citing the fact that under the laws of war detainees should be protected from acts of violence and degrading treatment, including being exposed to insults and “public curiosity.”

In one video filmed just days after the ground invasion began, soldiers pull a dead corpse behind a vehicle. In another, which emerged early this year, a soldier mockingly advertises a family business near what appear to be Palestinian’s corpses.

The soldier holds up a banner for a barbershop near Tel Aviv called Hameragesh, featuring its slogan “We are the exciting ones.” Three lifeless bodies in plain clothes are sprawled on the road next to him; their identities and the circumstances of their deaths are unclear. The soldier waves the sign in time to the Hebrew rap song “Harbu Darbu,” which calls for retribution for Oct. 7 and has become a wartime hit in Israel.

The video appears to breach international humanitarian laws that oblige combatants to treat human remains with respect, said Fernando Travesi, executive director of the International Center for Transitional Justice.

The owner of the barbershop did not respond to requests for comment. But he doubled down in the face of criticism: “Our dear soldiers, you will have 20% off on the entire store!” read a Feb. 8 post on the barbershop’s Instagram, responding to criticism from an Israeli human rights group.

Experts caution that videos from the battlefield can only provide a “snapshot” and require further investigation. But soldier testimony — and in some case public statements by commanders — exhibit a disregard for international law, they said.

“As far as we were concerned, everyone who was around there was an enemy,” Lt. Col. Israel Ben Pazi told Israeli radio in February, citing the fact that the area had been designated a combat zone. “Whether he had a weapon on him or not, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Pazi told The Post he could not comment for this story without the permission of the Israeli military, which declined to allow an interview.

The statement shows “no adherence” to the principle of international law requiring that military forces distinguish between combatants and civilians, said Ellis.

Ziv, who served as a control officer for units inside Gaza, a role that involves trying to avoid friendly fire incidents by Israeli forces, said that the ground troops in the unit he was attached to near the humanitarian corridor also treated anyone they saw as a combatant as the area was considered “cleared.”

“They didn’t have to justify opening fire,” he said. “They just have to tell us that they did.”

‘EXPEL AND SETTLE’

In other videos that have emerged from the battlefield, soldiers have called for the return of Israeli settlers to Gaza, or the expulsion of Palestinians. Israel occupied Gaza following the 1967 war, withdrawing troops and settlements in 2005 but maintaining a partial land and sea blockade. Political statements from senior far-right members of Israel’s right-wing government like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are likely to reinforce the impression that such statements are acceptable on the battlefield, said Kasher, while some soldiers put religion above army rules, he said.

The IDF said in its statement that soldiers are “unequivocally” prohibited from engaging in political activities or expressing political opinions during their military service. “IDF commanders handle these incidents severely and firmly,” it said.

Such content is the reflection of a long-running battle between religious and secular forces within the rank and file of the military, said Ram Vromen, chairman of Israel’s Secular Forum.

“As long as more and more soldiers in the higher ranks are coming with a very clear nationalistic and religious vision, this influences the way that soldiers behave in combat,” he said.

In a video from November 2023, a soldier vows his battalion won’t stop until it completes what he says is its mission to “conquer, expel and settle.” He challenges Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Did you hear, Bibi? Conquer, and expel and settle,” he says, referring to the prime minister by his nickname. The Post was not able to identify the soldiers in the video.

A clip of the video was shown during the opening ceremony of the Conference for the Victory of Israel in January, a summit which called for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza and featured speeches from far-right politicians and settlement leaders, including Smotrich.

The soldier also appears in a photo from Gaza verified by The Post holding an Israeli flag emblazoned with the words “Returning home” — the slogan of the resettlement movement.

In January, the State Department condemned far-right political figures like Smotrich ally, National Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir for “advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza.”

Posts from soldiers have continued to trickle out in recent weeks as Israeli forces launched a new operation in northern Gaza and ordered swaths of the region to evacuate. A video story posted to Instagram with a Jabalya location tag at the end of October, filmed from inside a bulldozer, shows residents fleeing en masse. Israeli tanks flank the sidewalk where they walk. “A good week,” read the caption.

Other soldiers spoke to The Post about their desires to resettle the enclave. “The best solution to me is settlements,” said Avichai Levi, 41, a reservist and bulldozer driver who was deployed to Rafah. “This hurts the most. The real victory is them knowing that every time you do something severe, we will take more land, and more land, until they understand.”

CORRECTION
A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a video to shimon.zuc on Instagram. The video was posted by @1717Bazz on Twitter. The article has been corrected.

About this story
John Hudson contributed to this report. Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Elyse Samuels. Copy editing by Gaby Morera Di Núbila. Design and development by Audrey Valbuena. Design editing by Junne Alcantara. Translation by Judith Sudilovsky, Lior Soroka and Alon Rom.

By Ruby Mellen, Hajar Harb, Miriam Berger, Loveday Morris and Júlia Ledur

One minute, Haya Shabaka was brewing tea in her sister Abeer’s Gaza City home. The next, she and her relatives were plunged into darkness, said Abeer Shabaka, who was in the other room when an Israeli strike hit their building on Dec. 6.

“I felt that we were all underground,” Abeer recounted. “I heard my mother scream, but I did not know where she was. I saw Haya. She looked like she was asleep.”

Abeer said she screamed and screamed until help came, and was eventually pulled from the rubble. Her mother and sister are still buried underneath.

“I wish I had been killed with them,” Abeer said. The Israeli military said it was targeting a gathering of militants.

Without their bodies, or confirmation of their deaths, their family was unable to register them with Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

They remain uncounted.

On the week that Haya died, more than 2,000 people were reported dead by the ministry in Gaza.

Since then, according to its figures, nearly 25,000 more have been killed.

In the year-long war — which began after Hamas-led attacks on Israel killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians — Israeli military operations have taken 41,965 lives as of Oct. 8, according to the ministry.

The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but says the majority of those killed have been women and children.

Experts say the true death toll is likely much higher.

In mid-August, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said more than 17,000 militants had been killed in Gaza, but did not say how the military arrived at the figure.

During the war, some 2 million Palestinians have been displaced, pushed into ever-shrinking spaces, and Hamas fighters have taken shelter among them. Israel has used that as a justification to bomb hospitals, schools, mosques and tent encampments.

The Israeli military said it exerts “significant efforts” to avoid harm to civilians, including through evacuation orders. Spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said the IDF does not have an estimate for the number of civilians it has killed, pointing to how long it took for Israel to work out how many of its own citizens had died on Oct. 7. He described every civilian death as a “tragedy.”

In the early days of the conflict, medical staff at each hospital in Gaza logged the name, gender and identification number of each victim that passed through, and the Health Ministry put out a daily death toll by combining those figures. As the months passed, and Gaza’s medical system collapsed, it became much more difficult to count the dead.

The ongoing chaos of the war upended what researchers say was once a robust reporting system for tracking and identifying the dead. Starting in November, the ministry included both identified and unidentified bodies that passed through hospitals and morgues, while it worked to put a name to each victim.

But the latest Ministry of Health report still includes around 6,000 unidentified bodies.

Then there are the uncounted — those who died under the rubble or were buried by family members without ever being taken to a hospital or morgue. This story focuses on their cases.

Khalil Awad, 61

Khalil Awad loved children. He owned a small sweets shop in Gaza City and often gave free candy to the kids on the street, said his niece, Faten Awad.

“Time passed quickly with him,” she said.

On the night of Dec. 1, the house in Gaza City where Khalil was sheltering was bombed, killing him and 23 of his relatives, including his two children, according to Faten. The IDF said it was not aware of a strike at the location.

“We were shocked,” Faten said. She had just spoken with him the day before.

Because of intense fighting in northern Gaza, it took Faten three months to reach the destroyed home. When she arrived, she started to dig through the rubble with her hands. But all she could recover were fragments of clothes and bones.

She wrapped their remains in shrouds and buried them.

Like the deaths in the Awad family, many others have gone unrecorded.

A clearer picture may not emerge until the war is over and researchers — currently banned by Israel from entering Gaza — can access the enclave.

Families are unable to register their dead for a variety of reasons, said Mike Spagat, a professor who specializes in casualty figures at Royal Holloway, University of London.

It’s unclear how many bodies have passed through hospitals without being registered, he said, or whose relatives may not have been able to log their deaths through a new online process.

In some families — where multiple generations have been wiped out in an instant — there might simply be no one left to document their loss.

Since the beginning of the war, researchers at Airwars, a British watchdog that tracks harm to civilians, have scoured open sources for the identities of those killed in Israeli strikes. Names are pulled from internet posts, news articles and, where possible, from the sides of body bags, then cross-checked against Ministry of Health lists.

The organization identified nearly 3,000 deaths in the first 17 days of the war.

A Washington Post analysis of the Airwars data found that more than 30 percent were not listed by the health ministry.

On Oct. 9, 2023, an airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp killed Muhammad Nabil Saadat and his cousin Ismail, along with dozens of others. Muhammad’s name appeared on the Health Ministry’s list, according to Airwars. Ismail’s did not.

Airwars said seven members of the Al Zwaidi family were killed in the same attack. None of them were included in the official count.

Data gleaned from open-source information can only provide a limited window, but it all points to an undercount of deaths, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars.

“What we’ve been able to capture is just a fraction of the reality,” she said.

Mahmoud Abdel Ghafour, 14

Mahmoud Abdel Ghafour wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, said his sister, 20-year-old Miryam Abdel Ghafour. He loved to play soccer and eat shawarma. His mother spoiled him because he was the youngest child.

On Dec. 7, as the Israeli army pressed further into the southern city of Khan Younis, a strike hit the family home, killing Mahmoud and his parents. The IDF said it was not aware of a strike at that time and location.

Miryam and Mahmoud had relocated to their uncle’s house earlier that month. Two days before the attack their mother asked them to come home. Miryam said it was too dangerous and decided to stay. Her mother told her to send Mahmoud back alone.

“They were civilians and believed that no harm would befall them,” said another relative, Yasser Abdel Ghafour, who lives in Egypt.

Workers ultimately recovered 17 bodies from the rubble, but were unable to find Mahmoud and his family, Yasser said.

After ten months of searching, Yasser said, the family finally retrieved the remains of their loved ones on Sept. 30.

“They were just bones,” he said. “But retrieving them is important to us so that we can honor them by burying them in the family cemetery.”

Hatem Mohammed Alketani, 35

Brothers Hatem and Hazem Alketani lived in houses across the street from each other in the Tufah neighborhood of Gaza City, said their brother, Nader Alketani.

The brothers and their wives took advantage of a quiet moment on Dec. 12 to go outside and catch up with each other. They went back in just minutes before the airstrike hit.

Hazem survived, pulling his injured wife and five daughters out of the rubble with him. But no one could reach Hatem or his family under the wreckage.

The IDF said it was not aware of a strike in the area.

Before the war, Hatem was a fruit seller in one of Gaza City’s central squares, said Nader, and liked to take his children to the beach.

The morning after the strike, Nader and some friends of his sneaked out of their homes nearby, navigating through side roads and ruins to reach what remained of his brother’s home — and family.

“We were able to extract Hatem’s wife with our own hands, who had been cut in half. And we extracted the upper part of Hatem’s body,” Nader said. “But the remaining five children are still under the rubble.”

The family did not have the strength to register them with the Health Ministry. “My back was broken forever by the loss,” Nader said.

Ayloul Qaud, 7

Like so many others, Ayloul Qaud and her family were displaced multiples times during the war — moving south from Gaza City, first to Khan Younis and then to Rafah. She died in June, a month before her eighth birthday.

Ayloul was sheltering in an encampment called Swedish Village, near the Egypt-Gaza border, with her parents and two siblings, said her aunt Hiba Muqdad. Hiba begged the family to come shelter with them in Khan Younis, but they believed they were safe where they were.

Hiba spoke with her sister, Rawaa Qaud, on the evening of June 6. She could hear Israeli tanks in the background.

“The last words she said to me were, ‘Tell my father that I miss him,’” Hiba said.

Three days later, after losing touch with Rawaa, her father and brother traveled to find them. Rawaa, her husband and children had all been killed, Hiba said.

Rawaa "had been shot in the back,” Hiba said, and was still holding Ayloul, who appeared to have a head injury. The IDF said its forces were responding to an “imminent threat” in the area.

Before they could bury or register the bodies, Hiba recounted, Israeli tanks began shooting at them, so they fled the area.

Ayloul was “the most beautiful child I have ever seen in my life, inside and out,” said Hiba, in between sobs. “We would walk in the street and she would refuse to buy anything, knowing that other children in the street were unable to eat the same thing.”

Moween Shuheiber, 6

Moween Shuheiber’s relatives remember him as a mature, thoughtful child.

He died the morning of Nov. 17 when an Israeli airstrike hit his family’s home in Gaza City, said his cousin Adham Shuheiber, who could see the wreckage from his ground-floor window. Adham said they pulled 30 dead bodies from the rubble that day. Eight others were injured and died later from their wounds because there was no safe route to the hospital, he added.

The IDF said it was not aware of a strike in the area.

Moween died alongside his mother, father, sister, grandmother and aunt.

“I lost the meaning of life with the loss of my family members,” said 17-year-old Malak Shuheiber, Moween’s cousin. “But the loss of Moween had a special impact on me.”

Malak said the boy dreamed of becoming a businessman with a luxury car, or a pediatrician for children injured in war.

“I think he breathed his last while covering his ears,” said Malak. “Because that’s what he did every time he heard the sounds of planes.”

About this story
All photos and videos, courtesy of the families.

Design and development by Yutao Chen.

Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Reem Akkad, Emily Eng, Joseph Moore and Jennifer Samuel. Video editing by Joe Snell. Copy editing by Jamie Zega.

Sources: Casualties data is from Gaza’s Ministry of Health as of Oct. 8. Gaza’s Ministry of Health did not release daily death tolls for most of Nov. 2023. There was a pause in fighting between Nov. 24 and Nov. 30.

Data on uncounted deaths is from Airwars, whose researchers have analyzed the first 17 days of war, cross-referencing open source reports of casualties with the death toll list published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Analysts say the buildup of the Netzarim Corridor is part of a large-scale project by the Israeli military to reshape Gaza and entrench its presence there.

By Loveday Morris, Evan Hill, Samuel Granados and Hazem Balousha

Israeli troops are fortifying a strategic corridor that carves Gaza in two, building bases, taking over civilian structures and razing homes, according to satellite imagery and other visual evidence — an effort that military analysts and Israeli experts say is part of a large-scale project to reshape the Strip and entrench the Israeli military presence there.

The Netzarim Corridor is a four-mile-long road just south of Gaza City that runs from east to west, stretching from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas has made Israel’s withdrawal from the area a central demand in cease-fire negotiations.

But even as talks have continued over the past two months, Israeli forces have been digging in. Three forward operating bases have been established in the corridor since March, satellite imagery examined by The Washington Post shows, providing clues about Israel’s plans. At the sea, the road meets a new, seven-acre unloading point for a floating pier, an American project to bring more aid into Gaza.

Israel insists it does not intend to permanently reoccupy Gaza, which its troops controlled for 38 years until withdrawing in 2005. But the construction of roads, outposts and buffer zones in recent months points to an expanding role for Israel’s military as alternative visions for postwar Gaza falter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released few concrete plans for the “day after” — a source of frustration for his generals and for Washington — but has repeatedly vowed to maintain “indefinite” security control over the enclave. In addition to conducting future raids from outside, Israeli troops may need to “be inside” Gaza to ensure the demilitarization of Hamas, Netanyahu said in a podcast interview earlier this week.

In addition to leverage in negotiations, control of the corridor gives the Israeli military valuable flexibility, allowing troops to be deployed quickly throughout the enclave. It also affords the Israel Defense Forces the ability to maintain control over the flow of aid and the movement of displaced Palestinians, which it says is necessary to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.

At least 750 buildings have been destroyed in what appears to be a systematic effort to create a “buffer zone” that stretches at least 500 yards on either side of the road, according to an analysis by Hebrew University’s Adi Ben-Nun, a geographic data specialist. An additional 250 buildings have been razed in the area of the U.S. pier, he said.

The IDF declined to comment on the clearing of buildings around the corridor, saying it could not answer operational questions during an ongoing war.

Military experts say it is part of a large-scale, long-term reshaping of Gaza’s geography, harking back to past Israeli plans to carve Gaza into easier-to-control cantons.

“What we need is full freedom of operation for the IDF everywhere in Gaza,” said Amir Avivi, a reserve brigadier general and former deputy commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division.

‘Welcome to Netzarim Base’

The Netzarim Corridor is named after an Israeli settlement that used to sit on the coastal route — the second “finger” of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “five fingers” strategy that envisioned carving Gaza into segments, all under Israeli security control. The plan was only partially implemented before Sharon — once a champion of settlements — ordered an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

“It’s no surprise that Israel went back and established this as a new corridor,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former IDF spokesman. “The terrain is the most conducive there and it suits the military purposes.”

The Netzarim axis was among the first targets for Israeli troops after they invaded Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, pushing forward to cleave the Strip in two.

By Nov. 6, troops had cut an informal, winding track to the sea that allowed armored vehicles to reach al-Rashid Road, a major north-south thoroughfare that runs along Gaza’s coast. In February and March, Israeli troops formalized the corridor by building a straight road a few hundred meters to the south. The last section of the road, nearest to the coast, was completed between March 5 and March 9, satellite imagery shows.

The IDF says the road enables military vehicles to travel from one side of the Strip to the other in just seven minutes, giving soldiers speedy and unimpeded access to northern and central Gaza. It was used as a base of operations for recent IDF attacks in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, said one Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with IDF protocol.

The corridor bisects Gaza’s only two major north-south roads — Salah al-Din Road, in the middle of the territory, and al-Rashid Road along the coast. The IDF began building forward operating bases at both points in early March.

The bases offer signs that the IDF could be preparing at some point for a controlled return of civilians to the north. Next to both bases, on roads leading north, are structures that appear to be “long parallel intake hallways” leading to a central compound, said Sean O’Connor, a lead analyst for satellite imagery at the security firm Janes.

The United States has said that Gazans who fled to Rafah and other points south should be allowed to return to their homes in the north; United Nations experts have said blocking them could amount to the “forcible transfer” of the population, a crime against humanity.

Jumaa Abu Hasira, 37, said soldiers fired shots in the air as he approached the corridor last month during a lull in the fighting, when rumors swirled that families could go north again. He was then detained, he said — blindfolded, hit with a rifle butt, beaten and interrogated for eight hours.

The IDF acknowledged that soldiers used “cautionary fire” as Gazans, including “armed terrorists,” approached the corridor, but did not respond to questions about Abu Hasira’s alleged detention.

The al-Rashid outpost also features observation points and a possible sentry post, said William Goodhind, an open-source researcher with Contested Ground, a research project that tracks military movements in satellite imagery.

The forward operating base on al-Rashid Road sits next to a jetty constructed in mid-March to receive aid for distribution by the World Central Kitchen charity. The U.S. floating pier is in the same area, with IDF troops providing security for shipments by sea.

“Welcome to Netzarim Base,” reads the blue graffiti on the concrete barriers outside, according to a photo geolocated by The Post and posted on X by an Israeli journalist who said it was spray-painted by his brother. At night, bright white flood lights are visible for miles around.

“It is the only place in Gaza that is lit,” said one 29-year-old woman who lives just south of the base, speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety. “They usually go to an area and leave afterward,” she said of Israeli troops, adding that in Netzarim they look set to stay.

The fact that the pier lands at the end of the Israeli-military-controlled corridor “suggests the IDF wants to be in control of the flow of aid,” said Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Le Beck International. The corridor also links up with Gate 96, a new access point on Israel’s border with central Gaza that has recently been opened for aid trucks, according to the military official.

“You’re waiting for three to four hours, you can be sent back, you can be arrested,” Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said of aid trucks trying to traverse the corridor.

The United Nations has said that Israel’s repeated refusal to allow humanitarian convoys access to the north has magnified the hunger crisis there — described by the head of the World Food Program as a “full-blown famine.”

Radar and observation capabilities have been installed at the new outposts, said Doron Kadosh, a military reporter with Israel’s army-run radio station who visited the Salah al-Din outpost last month. His photos show blue and white portable toilets, generators, and red and white communications towers.

“There was nothing,” he said of his first visit along the corridor in October, when it was still just a tank track. Now bases have sleeping areas, showers, a portable canteen building and hardcover shelters, Kadosh said.

Israeli troops also appear to have commandeered nearby civilian structures and turned them into military outposts. One is a former school in the village of Juhor ad Dik, about a mile from the border with Israel. Protective sand berms appeared at the location between March 15 and March 30, according to satellite imagery. The rest of the village has been destroyed.

Abdel Nasser, 45, fled his farmhouse in Juhor ad Dik with his wife and five children in October. “It used to be a haven for my family and me … where we spent countless beautiful moments together,” he said.

“About two weeks ago, my neighbors informed me that the entire area had been destroyed, and all the surrounding agricultural land had been bulldozed.” He hasn’t been able to bring himself to tell his wife yet.

Israeli troops also appear to be using the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which once specialized in treatment for cancer patients, as a base of operations. The hospital shut down in the first week of November because of nearby airstrikes and lack of fuel, and thousands of cancer patients have been left without care. Sand berms appeared around the hospital in late November.

An Israeli soldier filmed himself tearing down large parts of the hospital with an earth mover in February. Images published online on May 8 by the Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi and geolocated by The Post show Israeli soldiers using the hospital as a sniper position.

By March, Israeli forces had cleared hundreds of acres around the hospital — demolishing greenhouses and blowing up Israa University and the Palace of Justice, which housed Gaza’s high courts.

“Israel has not provided cogent reasons for such extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure,” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in February.

In all, the area cleared around the corridor and the pier encompasses at least four square miles, or a little more than 2,500 acres, though extensive damage to buildings and agricultural land extends farther, according to the analysis by Ben-Nun from Hebrew University.

“Everything is demolished along the way,” he said. “Completely demolished.”

Leveraging the corridor

Israel has indicated it may be willing to pull out of the corridor in the short term. The proposed cease-fire deal that Hamas agreed to last week sets out a staggered drawdown from the area, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Post and verified by a person close to the negotiations.

On the 22nd day, the IDF must withdraw entirely from the Netzarim Corridor area and “completely dismantle military sites and installations,” it says.

But the IDF is likely to have been given assurances that it could return to Netzarim, even if it were forced to leave for a few months during a cease-fire, Horowitz said. The construction of multiple outposts, roads and extensive clearing “would suggest this might become permanent,” he said.

A protracted period of military occupation appears increasingly likely in the absence of other plans for governance in postwar Gaza, military analysts say. Israel has pushed back against a U.S. proposal for a return of the Palestinian Authority, and there appears to be little regional buy-in for Arab security forces.

A long-term Israeli troop presence would be deeply unpopular in Gaza, with the corridor already a lightning rod for attacks. Hamas and other militant groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, have launched more than half a dozen rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli troops in the corridor in the past week.

But as Hamas returns to northern areas already cleared by the IDF, military occupation — once an unthinkable suggestion within Israel — is now being openly discussed.

“There is no other option,” said Michael Milshtein, former adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

Hajar Harb in London, Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo, Karen DeYoung in Washington, Jarrett Ley in New York, Laris Karklis in Washington and Júlia Ledur in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

CLARIFICATION
A previous version of this article referred to a cease-fire deal that Hamas agreed to this month. It was a proposed cease-fire deal that was later rejected by Israel. The article has been updated.

By Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louisa Loveluck, Miriam Berger and Cate Brown

For 3½ long hours on Jan. 29, the cellphone in 6-year-old Hind Rajab’s hands was the closest thing she had to a lifeline. Alone in the back seat of a car outside a Gaza City gas station, she was drifting in and out of consciousness, surrounded by bodies, as she told emergency dispatchers that Israeli tanks were rumbling closer.

From the operations room of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), roughly 50 miles away in the city of Ramallah, the team on duty had done their best to save the child. Paramedics were on their way, the dispatchers kept telling her: Hold on.

The paramedics were driving to their deaths.

Twelve days later, when a Palestinian civil defense crew finally reached the area, they found Hind’s body in a car riddled with bullets, according to her uncle, Samir Hamada, who also arrived at the scene early that morning. The ambulance lay charred roughly 50 meters (about 164 feet) away from the car, its destruction consistent with the use of a round fired by Israeli tanks, according to six munitions experts.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said it had conducted a preliminary investigation and that its forces were “not present near the vehicle or within the firing range” of the Hamada family car. Nor, the IDF said, had it been required to provide the ambulance permission to enter the area. The State Department said it has raised the case repeatedly with the Israelis. “The Israelis told us there had, in fact, been IDF units in the area, but the IDF had no knowledge of or involvement in the type of strike described,” spokesman Matthew Miller said.

A Washington Post investigation found that Israeli armored vehicles were present in the area that afternoon. The Post additionally found that the gunfire audible as Hind and her cousin Layan begged for help and the extensive damage caused to the ambulance were consistent with Israeli weapons. The analysis is based on satellite imagery, contemporaneous dispatcher recordings, photos and videos of the aftermath, interviews with 13 dispatchers, family members and rescue workers, and more than a dozen military, satellite, munitions and audio experts who reviewed the evidence, as well as the IDF’s own statements.

After this story published, Miller said: “The death of Hind Rajab is an unspeakable tragedy — something that never should have occurred and never should occur. … So what we are going to do is take the information that is contained in that Washington Post story, we’re going to go back to the government of Israel and ask them for further information. We would still welcome a full investigation into this matter, and how it occurred in the first place.”

PRCS as well as representatives from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the Civil Defense who visited the scene on Feb. 10 provided visuals to The Post, which it verified by independently confirming the location using satellite imagery, open-source maps and eyewitness interviews.

The Post’s review also found that the ambulance was discovered along a route provided by COGAT, an arm of the Israeli Defense Ministry that generally coordinates safe passage for medical vehicles with the IDF. COGAT initially referred specific questions about the ambulance to the IDF. In mid-March, Elad Goren, head of Coordination and Liaison Administration at COGAT, told The Post that the agency “coordinated everything … including the ambulance that wanted to go and find Hind,” but said he was “not aware” of the specifics. COGAT did not respond to repeated requests to clarify.

The IDF denied that any coordination had taken place, repeating its assertion that its forces were not in the area. It did not comment on two detailed timelines of the incident, or on the expert findings, provided by The Post.

It was not possible to reach Hamas’s military wing for comment on the incident.

Humanitarian officials have warned that a system of coordination with Israel’s military, designed to protect their aid deliveries and lifesaving ambulance maneuvers, is broken. Israeli strikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers in Gaza on April 1 and stirred global outrage came after failed deconfliction efforts.

More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israeli military operations in Gaza, according to local health authorities. Amid a war of unyielding horror, Hind’s case touched a nerve around the world, in large part because her recorded cries for help offered a glimpse into the terrors faced by civilians.

9:32 a.m.

Generations of the Hamada family had lived on al-Wahda Street in the northern part of Gaza City for decades. Everything changed on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants stormed border communities in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, including civilians in their homes and young people at a concert, and taking at least 240 hostages back to Gaza. The assault drew a punishing response from Israel, which insists its campaign is necessary to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities.

More than 75 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million has been displaced by the fighting, many residents multiple times, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Hamada family fled their houses; some went south, while others sheltered closer to home, in the nearby Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in western Gaza City.

But late on Jan. 28, Israeli forces returned to western Gaza City in numbers. Posts on social media show heavy gunfire and airstrikes in that part of the city just after midnight local time. At 9:32 a.m., the IDF issued a call in Arabic on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, asking residents in the west of Gaza City — including the Tel al-Hawa area — to evacuate immediately.

Hind’s uncle, Bashar, and his wife packed her into the car along with her four cousins, Bashar’s brother Samir said. They planned to drive north, out of the evacuation zone and back toward the family home in northern Gaza City.

The family stopped less than a quarter of a mile from where they started.

Around 1 p.m., Hind’s cousin, 15-year-old Layan, called Samir. She told him they were surrounded and that the Israeli army had opened fire on their car.

​​Everyone in the vehicle, except for Hind and Layan, were dead, she said. Samir called another uncle, Mohammed, who eventually reached the PRCS.

A dispatcher, Omar al-Qam, first reached Layan around 2:30 p.m.

The girl screamed, and the call dropped. “Hello,” Qam shouted. “Hello?”

While Qam spoke to Layan, 62 gunshots are audible over six seconds in two bursts of fire on a recording of the call, according to Earshot, a nonprofit that conducts investigations using audio evidence.

Steven Beck, an acoustic analyst who consulted with the FBI for more than a decade, examined the recording at the request of The Post, and found the number of rounds per minute fired was faster than an automatic AK-patterned rifle, which Hamas fighters often use. The rate, he said, was more akin to weapons commonly issued to Israeli forces. Earshot also found the rate of fire to be faster than an AK-patterned rifle.

The call, which began around 2:30 p.m., ended in less than a minute.

A satellite image captured by Planet Labs roughly an hour later, at 3:31 p.m., shows at least four Israeli armored vehicles about 300 meters (985 feet) up the road from the girls.

5:40 p.m.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society routinely coordinates the passage of its ambulances with Israeli authorities, in the hope of securing safe access to areas where the situation on the ground is potentially dangerous.

Fathi Abu Warda — a liaison between the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry in Ramallah and COGAT, an arm of the Israeli Defense Ministry that oversees the Palestinian territories — said that permission for an ambulance to proceed to Hind arrived in the form of a route map from COGAT. Abu Warda sent the map to the PRCS dispatch team on WhatsApp at 5:40 p.m., according to messages reviewed by The Post.

The map, reviewed by The Post, appears to have been made in Google Maps and has a clear blue line, instructing the ambulance drivers to follow an indirect route that avoided much of the evacuation area.

Ismail al-Ghoul, a correspondent with the Al Jazeera news agency, said he was sitting with the paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, at al-Ahli Hospital when they received the map. The paramedics headed out quickly to the location where Hind was trapped. It was roughly two miles away — down Beirut street, then right, and onto al-Majdal Street.

“The details were completely clear,” Ghoul said.

The paramedics had just turned onto al-Majdal Street, the lights of the ambulance flashing, when Zeino reported that a green laser was hovering just in front of them.

The dispatcher told the ambulance to keep moving, slowly. Seconds later, the line drops.

The ambulance was later found roughly 50 meters (about 165 feet) south of Hind’s family car and about 350 meters (1,150 feet) south of where military vehicles had been captured in satellite imagery just over two hours earlier.

In a statement posted at 9:02 p.m. local time, the IDF said its forces had “cut off Gaza City, with one force arriving from the north towards the south, while a second force arrived from the south to the north.” They traveled “through the city center to Shifa hospital,” the statement said.

Al-Shifa, which Israel has repeatedly targeted, alleging that Hamas fighters are regrouping there, is roughly three-quarters of a mile from where the Hamada family car stopped.

The green laser — known as a dazzler — would normally suggest that the ambulance was identified but not necessarily targeted by a ground unit operating ahead of the armed vehicles, according to Avihai Stollar, a researcher with Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group composed of Israeli army veterans who oppose the occupation and that has compiled testimonies from former soldiers.

The IDF, in response to questions from The Post, did not clarify if the green dazzler belonged to its forces and what signal it may have been intended to send.

Social media posts from 2018 suggest that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups have also used green dazzlers to obscure Israeli soldiers’ eyesight. Ashka Jhaveri, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of War, a group that closely monitors conflicts, said she had not observed the use of green dazzlers by either side in this conflict.

6 p.m.

As the call with the paramedics drops at 6 p.m., a bang is audible on the call with Hind.

But the call with the girl continued, suggesting that cellphone service was not cut.

Red Crescent dispatchers had managed to patch Hind’s mother, Wesam, into the call in the hope that it might calm the child.

When the bang echoed out through the phone line, Wesam cried out: “Hanood, are you okay?”

A moment later, Hind replied.

“Yes,” she said.

By this point, everyone on the call with Hind — her family, the dispatchers — were praying they would not lose her too. She was falling silent for long periods. The team did what they could to keep her talking, but it was clear that the child’s thoughts had begun to loop. She just kept saying, “Come get me, quickly.”

If the phone ran out of battery, Faqih told her, she was to stay in the car, where they could still find her. “If night comes and we don’t come, close your eyes so that you don’t see the tanks.”

They lost contact with her soon after 6 p.m., spokeswoman Nebal Farsakh recalled.

No one spoke much after that. The room felt muffled with shock. They tried to call Hind again and again, Farsakh said, but no one answered.

Twelve days later

The ambulance had come to a stop where a dark spot resembling a scorch mark first appeared in satellite imagery taken at 10:21 a.m. on Jan. 30 — the morning after contact with the paramedics and Hind was lost.

When the IDF withdrew from the area nearly two weeks later on Feb. 10, Palestinian residents, including Samir, Hind’s uncle, and a civil defense crew found a haunting scene.

The door and pieces of the hood of the family car had been torn off. Samir described his brother’s body as “dangling” from the driver’s seat. The stench of decomposing corpses clung to the vehicle. He struggled to look at the bodies of the five children sandwiched on the back seat. Hind sat to the right of Layan, who was behind the driver. A page from what looks like a coloring book was crumpled where their feet would have rested. The bodies were so decomposed that it was not possible to immediately see where the gunshots had hit them, Samir said. “We were only able to deduce their identities,” he recalled.

Holes in the Hamada family car were probably made by a 7.62-caliber machine gun, a weapon fixed to the Merkava, Namer and Puma, said Andrew Galer, head of the land platform and weapons team at defense intelligence firm Janes, who examined photos and video of the aftermath.

Armored vehicles, including some that roughly match the size of those seen in the Jan. 29 satellite imagery, were also present in the same location multiple times in the following 12 days.

A fragment of a U.S.-made 120mm round, which can be fired by the Merkava, was visible in video and images after rescue crews searched the scenes.

The Post was not able to determine exactly where just north of the ambulance the fragment was originally found or if it was directly connected to the ambulance strike, given the time elapsed and the ongoing fighting.

The ambulance was a burned-out shell, video shows, and almost nothing remained of the paramedics’ bodies. There was a hole approximately 300 millimeters (almost a foot) in diameter adjacent to where the license plate would have been.

“The damage to the rear does look like the exit of a projectile,” Chris Cobb-Smith, a security consultant and former artillery officer in the British army, wrote in a message, noting that it appeared to be “targeted with a direct fire munition” and was “approximately the size of a tank shell.”

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, added that it appeared to exit “the vehicle relatively level to the ground,” which suggests it was “fired from ground level on a fairly flat trajectory, rather than an air-delivered or indirect-fire munition.”

A round fired by a tank is just one possibility, Jenzen-Jones and multiple other experts cautioned, noting that there is little data on craft-produced Hamas munitions and few tests have been done to predict what would happen if other munitions were used against a thin-skinned vehicle. Common rocket launchers used by Hamas are able to fire different antitank rounds, including the standard PG-7, which could not create the observed damage, according to munitions experts.

None of the six munitions experts interviewed by The Post could say definitively what munition caused the damage or killed the paramedics based on the ambulance alone, because of the time elapsed and the complexity of urban combat. They agreed, however, that the damage to the ambulance was consistent with the potential use of a round fired from Israeli tanks that match the vehicles captured in satellite imagery in the area that day.

The seven bodies of the Hamada family were buried at al-Shifa Hospital. There was no medical report, Samir said.

“All that mattered to us at that moment was to retrieve them and bury them in a decent way.”

About this story
John Hudson in Washington, Hazem Balousha in Amman, Jordan, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Jarrett Ley in New York and Imogen Piper in London contributed to this report.

Satellite imagery provided by Planet Labs. Graphics by Jarrett Ley. Design and development by Irfan Uraizee.

CORRECTION
A photo caption in a previous version of this article contained an incorrect age for Layan Hamada. She was 15, not 13. In addition, Yousef Zeino's first name was misspelled. The caption has been corrected.