![A Palestinian boy carries mattresses as he flees the family house. Photo: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis A Palestinian boy carries mattresses as he flees the family house. Photo: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/4e89267b-35e6-4c3c-be2c-ce159cd25eb9.jpg/r0_0_727_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![Nissana Sukar in the rubble outside her home in Shujaiyah. Photo: Ruth Pollard Nissana Sukar in the rubble outside her home in Shujaiyah. Photo: Ruth Pollard](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/9512fa99-fee1-40e6-a6d8-3ce75123409e.jpg/r0_0_729_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![“We have seen many wars, but nothing like this,” says Nissana Sukar in Shujaiyah. Photo: Ruth Pollard “We have seen many wars, but nothing like this,” says Nissana Sukar in Shujaiyah. Photo: Ruth Pollard](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/9abdf8d6-6779-4a46-b12f-df8730bfd1d7.jpg/r0_0_729_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Shujaiya: Nissana Sukar picked her way carefully over the mountain of twisted metal, smashed concrete and rubble that once was the apartment block next to her home.
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As Israeli drones buzzed overhead and the boom of shelling echoed through the air, she stopped to sift through the edge of the devastation to try to recover something – anything – from the wreckage of her own apartment.
The 25-year-old rehabilitation graduate walked away with very little – she was able to salvage a bag of disposable nappies before deciding to move to safer ground as people began running along the ruined road warning that Israeli tanks were on the move nearby.
“We have seen many wars, but nothing like this,” she says. “We are strong, but look around, it is a disaster.”
On Nazzaz Street, cousins Mohamed and Bashir Sukar sat quietly watching over their ruined apartment block, blown to pieces in an Israeli strike during a sustained military operation in Shujaiya late last week.
“There are so many dead we cannot count them,” 36-year-old Mohamed said. “We pulled about 150 people from the rubble and we are scared there are more bodies underneath – it is a miracle we survived the shelling, we have some family in hospital, some sheltering in UN schools and some were killed.”
He said residents received a pre-recorded message from the Israel Defence Forces telling them to evacuate two days before the intense shelling started.
“It was such a general message we could not believe it was true – Israel was asking every single resident from Shujaiya to leave.”
After a devastating military assault across Gaza on Monday night in which as least 100 Palestinians were killed, the IDF continued to target neighbourhoods across Gaza, along with Shujaiya, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.
Already Israel’s military operations have reduced the inhabitable area of Gaza by 44 per cent, with the enforcement of a three-kilometre buffer zone around the strip and the insistence that civilians evacuate areas within the zone, the UN's Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
The move has created a huge population of displaced people, with more than 200,000 people seeking shelter in UN schools and thousands more in mosques and churches. Gaza was facing a humanitarian crisis, with supplies of clean water and electricity at critically low levels, said the spokesman of UNRWA, Chris Gunness.
The death toll across Gaza rose to 1210, with a further 6896 injured, most of them civilians, the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s main power plant continued to burn from an overnight attack - the fourth strike on the critical electricity infrastructure since Israel’s military operation began three weeks ago.
Some Gaza neighbourhoods had already suffered without electricity for 36 hours, others were existing on as little as two hours a day, and human rights groups expressed deep fears about further chronic shortages as a result of the attack on the power plant.
Hopes of a ceasefire rose and then were quickly dashed by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the latest in a growing number of temporary lulls that have either never begun or failed to grow into a longer-term cessation of violence.
Despite statements from Palestinian negotiator and the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Abed Rabbo, indicating all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad had agreed to a 24-hour ceasefire, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad denied they had approved anything.
“There will be no peace and security until our people can live in dignity, and no ceasefire until the siege of Gaza is lifted,” the head of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, Mohamed Deif, said in an audio statement played on the Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa television on Tuesday night.
Before it will agree to any ceasefire, Hamas is insisting that both Israel and Egypt lift the blockade on its borders they implemented in 2007 when Hamas took power in Gaza. Israel is insisting that its troops remain on the ground during a ceasefire in order to continue to destroy the network of tunnels it says Hamas has built to facilitate attacks inside Israel.
Talk of a ceasefire came alongside reports that a Palestinian delegation led by President Mahmoud Abbas and including representatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad would meet in Cairo to discuss the ongoing crisis. Israel’s security council is due to meet on Wednesday, but in the meantime, a government spokesman said Israel would not take the ceasefire proposal seriously unless it was communicated directly from Hamas.
The IDF said five IDF soldiers were killed in combat when terrorists infiltrated Israel via a tunnel from Gaza and attempted to execute an attack near the community of Nahal Oz, raising the death toll of Israeli soldiers to 53, as well as three civilians. And on Tuesday evening, Israel’s missile defence system intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza over the city of Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem.