Attack, Withdraw, Return: Israel’s Bloody Cycle of War in North Gaza

When Israeli forces first swarmed into Gaza last year, they targeted North Gaza, an area stretching across densely packed urban centers and small strawberry farms near the border with Israel.

The military said that hardened Hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians there, so it struck residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools turned shelters. It was one of the deadliest moments of the war.

Now, almost exactly a year later, it is all happening again.

North Gaza is the epicenter of a renewed Israeli offensive that, over the past five weeks, has unleashed some of the Israeli military’s most devastating attacks yet. In an effort to stamp out what the military has called a Hamas resurgence, troops, tanks and armed drones have hammered the area almost daily, displacing 100,000 residents and killing likely more than 1,000 others, according to the United Nations. (Those statistics do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.)

There are so many corpses, multiple residents and a local doctor said, that stray dogs have begun to pick at them in the streets.

“Life over the past four weeks, if I can sum it up, is a people being exterminated,” said Islam Ahmad, 34, a freelance journalist from North Gaza who described helping bury neighbors in a mass grave.