Khan Yunis (Palestinian Territories): Safa Qandil returned home to Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Monday only to find that she no longer has one.Thousands of displaced Gazans have been trudging back through the apocalyptic landscape of the devastated city after the Israeli army pulled out on Sunday following months of fierce fighting with Hamas militants.But as often as not it is to find their home is no longer there.”We hoped we would find the house or the remnants of it or take something from it to cover us,” Qandil, 46, told AFP.”We did not find the house,” she said.That is not, however, the worst of her loss. Her son and his pregnant wife were killed by the Israeli army, she said.”My tragedy is great,” she said, adding that the army also killed her daughter-in-law’s “father, brother, sister, aunt and the rest of her family in a very heinous crime.””It is unnatural and indescribable,” she said.”In every house there is a martyr (someone dead), a wounded person, words cannot describe the magnitude of the devastation and the suffering we experienced.”We cried hysterically at the sight of the blood.”‘Nothing intact’Such is the destruction of the city that many residents returning from neighbouring Rafah, where more than 1.5 million Gazans have been sheltering, have struggled to find their way around.”We don’t recognise places, because nothing looks the same,” said Salim Sharab.Others told AFP that the smell of death hangs in the air, with people digging bodies of the rubble.The city’s civil defence appealed to the United Nations on Monday for hydraulic equipment to get to the bodies, most of which they say are badly decomposed.Sharab was still holding onto the hope that his home had survived the fighting and bombardment that levelled whole swathes of a city that was once home to nearly 400,000 people.Such was the 37-year-old’s longing to return, “even if my house is destroyed, I will set up my tent on top of it,” he said.



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