As a peace deal nears, Fr Gabriel Romanelli, parish priest of Gaza City’s Catholic parish, said the entire Gaza Strip has experienced a “tsunami” of destruction. Source: OSV News.
Historic momentum is felt across the Middle East as thousands gathered on Saturday in Tel Aviv ahead of the hostage release expected to take place today, and tens of thousands of Palestinians started to make their way back to their homes in northern Gaza Strip.
But those Palestinians have returned to see only mostly rubble left.
Hundreds of aid trucks slowly made their way out of a gigantic Rafah crossing queue into Gaza early yesterday morning — a territory exhausted, starving and flattened after a two-year war that started after Hamas, the Palestinian militant group ruling Gaza, carried out a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1200 people in massacres perpetrated in southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023.
The ensuing war has led to an estimated 67,000 Palestinian dead and 170,000 injured, the vast majority believed to be civilians.
US President Donald Trump will visit Israel today to address Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and meet hostage families. He will later fly to the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to witness the signing of a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, along with the other guarantors of the Gaza peace deal.
The peace deal comes at a point where people on both sides have expressed exhaustion with the war: Israelis waiting to see their loved ones, among them the 20 remaining hostages said to still be alive, and Palestinians overwhelmed by the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.
Fr Romanelli, lightly injured in the leg during the Israeli military strike on the Holy Family Parish compound on July 17, attempted to put into words the scale of Gaza’s tragedy.
“Do you remember when we saw the photos, the live images of the tsunami many times? How everything was utterly crushed, right? It’s literally like that” in Gaza, he said on Saturday.
“There are entire neighbourhoods like that, and in every neighbourhood there are many houses like that,” he said. The Catholic priest added that just as with a natural disaster there are fears of subsequent waves, the same feeling is palpable among Palestinians.
He said the peace deal is a clear sign that “something has changed” and “everyone is fed up with the war.”
FULL STORY
Amid historic deal, Gaza pastor says little is left after ‘tsunami’ of destruction (By Paulina Guzik, OSV News)
