A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Palestinian civilians who fled parts of Gaza City in the past two weeks are returning to find very little left of their homes.
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
They had evacuated after the Israeli military renewed its operations in what is the largest city in Gaza. At the same time, the U.S. is lifting a pause it had put on weapon shipments a month ago.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi joins us now from Tel Aviv. The Israeli military announced it had withdrawn from districts in Gaza City. So what happened?
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: So while intense urban combat, including Israeli airstrikes, continues in other parts of Gaza City, the Israeli military announced yesterday that it had left the district of Shujaiya, where it launched an offensive which lasted two weeks. The Shujaiya civil defense said that more than 60 Palestinians were killed, among them many women, and the Israeli military said it had killed dozens of militants in their operation and destroyed a number of tunnels. Now, Gaza City has seen numerous Israeli ground invasions since the beginning of the war in October, and about 300,000 Palestinians remained in the north during the last operation. This has been a pattern, though, in the war, where the Israeli military declares victory over Hamas and withdraws from towns, just for it to reenter, saying that Hamas has regrouped.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. And then what are those Palestinians who did evacuate - what are they seeing when they come back?
AL-SHALCHI: Utter devastation - the Shujaiya civil defense said that the neighborhood is uninhabitable. They said almost 120,000 Palestinians are now homeless and that the Subha (ph) medical clinic was destroyed. It used to provide services to almost 6,000 Palestinians. Civil defense also reports that Palestinian rescue teams are finding bodies that seem to have bled out, strewn across roads - that whole neighborhoods have turned into rubble and dust. And the civil defense says that they're having a hard time pulling out bodies that are stuck under the rubble of buildings, and some of them are entire families.
MARTÍNEZ: Wow. And what's happening in other parts of Gaza City?
AL-SHALCHI: So two days ago, the Israeli military told Palestinians in Gaza City that they could use routes it had provided if they chose to leave the area. The head of the Gaza civil defense said they aren't able to access certain areas because of snipers on rooftops. The thing is, this time, we didn't see that large exodus of Palestinians evacuating Gaza City as we have in previous attacks. We spoke to Fatima Dama (ph). She is a freelance journalist in north Gaza, near the Jabaliya district, and she said that while her family told her to leave, she said, what's the point?
FATIMA DAMA: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: Dama says, "since nowhere is safe, I'd rather die at home. At least I am familiar with my neighborhood."
MARTÍNEZ: Wow. And now U.S. officials say that they're going to be sending a large number of weapons withheld from Israel, but not all of them, right?
AL-SHALCHI: That's right. The Biden administration announced yesterday that it's going to go ahead and send a shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel that it had paused because the U.S. was concerned about Israeli military operations in Rafah - in the south of Gaza. Now, if you were following, in early May, the U.S. warned Israel against a full incursion in Rafah because of the risk to civilians. About 1 million Palestinians were sheltering there. The shipment at the time included 800 2,000-pound bombs, which are still going to be withheld.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi. Thank you very much.
AL-SHALCHI: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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