When people talk about which parts of the Gaza Strip have been most devastated in the war, Jabaliya nearly always comes up.
A town in the north of the enclave, Jabaliya was once home to some 116,000 people. But many fled south after the Israeli military launched its assault on Hamas, in retaliation for the militant group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
By the time the war was nearing its first anniversary, The New York Times calculated that four out of five structures in Jabaliya had been damaged or destroyed. And Israeli forces, which describe the town as a stronghold for Hamas, bombarded Jabaliya many more times since.
The photograph above was taken late in the morning of Feb. 13, a little more than three weeks into the first phase of a cease-fire that allowed food and other supplies to flood into Gaza, easing its humanitarian crisis.
The combat in Jabaliya had for months mostly prevented market vendors there from selling their wares, but as displaced Gazans returned, so did the stalls. Residents came home to an unrecognizable landscape, with craters sunken into the earth where many homes had once stood. They looked for their dead, and salvaged what they could from the ruins.
At the market that morning the talk was largely of survival. Questions mixed in the air with the smells of sewage and dust kicked up by bulldozers. Where could you find water? How about gas, and tents? How did you apply for aid? Most ominously, was the fighting truly over?
But few of those making their way around the reopened marked could ignore the tables around them, laden with fruit and vegetables after so many months of want. The townspeople, at least those who had a little money, ate voraciously.
