The Cosmic Watchdog

When Walid Abu Libdeh returned to Rafah with his young daughter, the 61-year-old engineer felt as though he was “in a horrible film” as he moved through the rubble-strewn streets, trying to figure out where his home once stood.

“Where are the houses? Where are the trees? Where are the animals? Where are the people we love?” he told NBC News’ ground crew in the southern Gaza city on Wednesday.

What has happened in Rafah feels like “Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” Libdeh added.

Six months ago, Rafah — situated on the Gaza-Egypt border — was home to well over a million Palestinians forcibly displaced from the war in Gaza, according to U.N. estimates. Now, the picture looks drastically different as Palestinians wade through rubble and debris to see what remains of their city.

Months of Israeli aerial bombardment have hammered the city and caused “almost total devastation,” Khaled Mohamed Al-Sheikh Eid, an engineer heading the Debris Removal and Roads Opening Committee for the Municipality of Rafah, told NBC News’ ground crew Wednesday.

“We were very surprised by the extent of the destruction and debris on the roads,” Al-Sheikh Eid added. “It has become evident to us that the level of destruction is enormous.”

Since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire went into effect late last week, nearly 3,000 aid trucks have so far entered Gaza to help city begin to rebuild, U.N. spokesperson Adnan Abu Hasna told NBC News.

In Rafah’s Al-Shawka area, NBC News video footage captured hundreds of trucks carrying food and fuel entering through the Kerem Shalom crossing Wednesday. 

Armed guards and masked men — some of them are Hamas militants and other are ordinary Palestinians by merchants to protect trucks — supervised their safe passage to ensure their distribution.

Local health officials say more than 47,000 people have been killed in Israeli bombing during the conflict, which began on Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out a terror attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and saw 251 people taken hostage.

With ceasefire deal now agreed and Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners beginning to return to their respective homes, Israeli officials have agreed to allow at least 600 truckloads of aid to enter Gaza daily during the initial six weeks.

That aid is much-needed: the U.N. has previously estimated that around 60% of Gaza’s infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, has been destroyed. That has left around 90% of Gaza’s population — almost 1.9 million people — displaced from their homes.

In Rafah, Al-Sheikh Eid told NBC News that preliminary estimates indicated around 70% of the buildings had been partially or completely destroyed, adding that all communication networks, water systems, sewage systems, and electricity infrastructure had also been demolished.

Given the urgent need to rebuild, a plan has been devised dividing streets into three sections: “main roads, secondary roads, and smaller streets within neighborhoods,” Al-Sheikh Eid said.

Will removing the piles of rubble and rebuilding smaller roads will require heavy machinery, the focus will remain on opening main roads by pushing debris to the roadside to allow vehicles to pass through, he added.

Standing on a dusty road with his daughter, Libdeh pointed to the remains of demolished buildings on his street. “This street, it was a very beautiful street,” he said. Now, “it’s just a mountain of concrete blocks.”