Israeli troops watch warily as Gaza residents join slow march south

At about 4pm on Wednesday, a column of men, women and children moved slowly through the rubble of the city they had once called home. Above them the blue sky was streaked with smoke.

To one side the skeletal remains of houses, stripped by shellfire and bullets to their bare concrete bones. To the other, the bulldozed berms from where men of the Israeli Defence Force’s Jerusalem brigade watched warily.

Automatic fire cracked some way away. A thudding bang signalled something nearer and bigger. Drones buzzed in the distance. The file of people moved forwards in fits and starts.

A young girl with a pink school bag, bulging with those belongings she had been able to take with her, stood in front of an old woman in a wheelchair pushed by a youth in a football shirt.

A middle-aged man in brown office trousers limped ahead behind a teenager pulling a suitcase on rollers through the shattered blocks of concrete, twisted iron and refuse. Three younger children stood in a row, waiting.

Many held their identity documents high in the air as they passed through the two shipping containers used by the soldiers as a makeshift screening centre. Through a bullhorn, a soldier shouted in Arabic: “Move along, don’t push, you in the red shirt stand aside.”

Occasionally, the soldiers switched to Hebrew, appealing to anyone who spoke Israel’s national language to make themselves known.

“You will be safe. No one will touch you,” the men with bullhorns shouted. The aim, said an officer, was to offer a route to safety for any hostage concealed among the thin crowd, especially children.

The IDF took the Guardian and a number of other media organisations into Gaza and, following longstanding guidelines, read this report for any sensitive military details. The Guardian was not asked to make any changes.

Six weeks ago, only a tiny handful of the residents of Gaza City had any inkling of what was about to happen. For most, that morning was like any other. Now they stood like so many victims of so many other wars on the shattered outskirts of what had been a bustling town not long before.

Just a short drive away, down a new road cut by the IDF through the sandy low hills east of Gaza City, and through the now redundant billion-dollar perimeter fence around Gaza, were the burnt out houses of Be’eri, a kibbutz that was one of the places worst-hit in the attacks launched into Israel by Hamas on 7 October in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians at home or at a dance party, were killed.

Since the Israeli offensive started a few days later, more than 11,000 in Gaza have been killed, of whom about 40% were under 18, according to Hamas-run health authorities.

On Wednesday after days of fighting in the centre of Gaza City, the IDF moved into al-Shifa hospital, after calling for the 2,500 or so patients, staff and displaced people there to evacuate. Israel is now under growing international pressure to agree a ceasefire.

The IDF has established what it calls “humanitarian corridors” to allow residents to leave the north of Gaza, which is the main battle-zone, for the relative safety of the southern half of the territory.

The file of Palestinians walking through the rubble were some of the 75,000 who have left over the previous 48 hours. Critics say the corridors are no substitute for a ceasefire that would allow free movement and desperately needed aid to be brought into Gaza and for power to be restored.

Watching them was Idan, 37, a reservist from north Israel. He had been among the first Israeli forces to reach the south. Mobilised with a phone call on the morning of 7 October, he had reached the scene of the rave party attacked by Hamas by late afternoon.

“It was a massacre. There are no other words. It was an atrocity,” he told the Guardian.

“I am a father, and they were all kids, just like your kids or mine, talented, happy young people … to see so many murdered people, it is hard,” he said.

Assaf, a 49-year-old NCO in the Jerusalem brigade, which has done much of the fighting in this sector of Gaza over recent weeks, stood nearby.

A resident of one of the villages just across the perimeter fence into Israel, he and five others had fought off the Hamas militants who had attacked his home last month.

“We are not looking for vengeance. I have four children. I want them to live peacefully. If I want that, then there is no other option than this war,” Assaf said.

“After those brutal murders, and all that has happened to us, no one who hasn’t experienced something like that has the right to judge us.”

Earlier, the soldiers had shown us the entrance to a tunnel, in what had once been a lemon orchard 30 metres or so from a house. The tunnel network built by Hamas extends across much of Gaza, and has long been considered virtually impregnable. The more than 240 hostages seized by the group and other smaller factions on 7 October are thought to be hidden deep underground.

Like almost every building across the few square miles of northern Gaza seen by the Guardian, the nearby house was a shattered wreck, split open and spilling its contents across the dusty soil. Thin cats picked their way past buckets, linen and clothes. On a wall within had been daubed graffiti: “I Want My Scalps.”

Col Netai Okshi, commander of the Jerusalem brigade, said fighting in Gaza had been “very, very complicated”, not least because his forces were split, with some deployed to the “humanitarian corridor” and others fighting Hamas.

“It is urban fighting. We are going from building to building … we warn in advance with telephones, media, flyers, sometimes with bullhorns, and the civilians usually leave,” Okshi said.

“If they don’t leave, they don’t get targeted but they can be hurt or killed. We don’t forcibly remove them but we still have to go in.”

Watching the line of Palestinians file through the rubble of their former homes, one soldier commented: “Put everything you can carry in your bag and walk? It’s better than death but it’s pretty bad.”