RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) – Asmahan Ismail Abu al-Rous started wondering a year ago about the cause of the cracks on the walls of her Gaza home. When she asked some of her more savvy neighbors, they told her: Militants were digging an attack tunnel not far away.
“I did not think much about it then. I thought that was the resistance’s business, not mine,” the widowed mother of four said Tuesday, standing amid the ruins of her two-story home in the Shawkah district, an eastern section of Rafah near Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Barely 50 meters (yards) away, according to villagers, is an entrance of the tunnel where Hamas fighters emerged Friday to attack Israeli soldiers. Two Israelis were killed and a third was initially believed to be captured by the militants.
That attack drew what was by far the heaviest Israeli shelling in the Gaza war, killing nearly 100 people that day alone and instantly unraveling a cease-fire shortly after it came into force. A day later, Israel determined the missing soldier, a 23-year-old infantry lieutenant, had been killed in the initial attack.
On Tuesday, when a new 72-hour truce took hold, residents returned for the first time to see the extent of the destruction – the worst in a single district anywhere in the Gaza Strip in four weeks of fighting.