Residents of Abu Ta’imah, on the outskirts of Khan Younis in Gaza, returned home to discover their neighborhood destroyed by bombs. They argued that the Palestinian area required a genuine ceasefire, not just an extension of the truce between Israel and Hamas.

At the beginning of the conflict, the residents of the eastern part of the city left, and they didn’t come back until Wednesday, when the truce was in its sixth day.

“We were shocked to see this destruction. We were shocked to see our homes, our streets, our lands, our yards and everything demolished,” said Gihad Nabil, who was recently married and had been living in Abu Ta’imah with his wife.

Standing on a roof with a view of ruined buildings and mounds of rubble as far as the eye could see, he said the area had been home to about 5,000 or 6,000 people before the war. He asked where they would go.

“My house is completely destroyed. My brother’s home, my uncle’s my neighbour’s, all of them destroyed. We don’t need this truce, we need a complete ceasefire,” he said, likening what he was seeing to an earthquake zone.

As Nabil and another man sat on the roof, talking and smoking a shisha pipe, a group of children down below sat around a small fire built on a pile of rubble and warmed up bread, which they shared.