DaysofPal – The Israeli Army Minister, Yisrael Katz, on Friday shared an aerial image of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, reduced entirely to rubble, boasting that the city had been “leveled to the ground.”
The photo, posted to Katz’s account on the platform X, revealed a haunting landscape of pulverized homes and shattered infrastructure, capturing the scale of devastation inflicted by months of relentless Israeli bombing.
“After Rafah and Beit Hanoun…,” Katz wrote, suggesting that the leveling of entire cities has become a military benchmark. The image showed no standing buildings, only a vast gray expanse of dust and ruins, marking the complete erasure of what was once a densely populated Palestinian town.
Beit Hanoun, located near Gaza’s northern border with Israel, has been under total siege for days. On Tuesday, the Israeli military announced it had encircled the city from all sides and launched a new wave of intensive airstrikes.
The latest escalation follows months of bombardment that have left the city’s infrastructure decimated and its population displaced or buried under rubble.
On June 2, the Municipalities Emergency Committee in northern Gaza declared Beit Hanoun a “disaster area,” citing the catastrophic destruction of infrastructure, the collapse of all vital services, and an unlivable humanitarian situation.
Before the current war began, the town was home to an estimated 60,000 people, spread over approximately 17,000 dunums. Today, nothing remains but broken concrete and dust.
The same fate has already befallen Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which lies along the border with Egypt. Once a final refuge for displaced Palestinians, Rafah has been almost entirely razed by Israeli forces.
As part of a controversial new plan announced on July 7, Katz unveiled Israel’s intention to create a so-called “humanitarian city” in Rafah. This proposed zone, located between the Morag and Philadelphia axes on the Egyptian border, is widely viewed by rights groups and analysts as a forced displacement scheme.
Israeli military analyst Alon Ben-David, speaking on Channel 13, described the area as a de facto detention zone, fenced off from the rest of Gaza. “This is not a humanitarian area. It’s a place from which you can only exit Gaza, not return,” he said. Ben-David added that this strategy could further expose Israel to international war crimes charges.
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