‘Annihilation of the Territory,’ French Journalist Describes Gaza City Destruction
In a visit organized and supervised by the Israeli military, Le Monde’s Jerusalem correspondent, Luc Bronner, entered Gaza City on October 3, 2025, alongside 15 international media outlets.
Bronner stayed in Gaza’s largest urban hub for three hours, describing the scale of the destruction he saw. “It’s almost difficult to describe, as there are so few words to express the mind-boggling nature of the destruction,” he said.
‘Annihilation’ of Gaza City
“There was nothing left but desolation as far as the eye could see: heaps of rubble, houses pulverized and sometimes flipped over, buildings shattered or missing a floor, a façade or a corner,” the French journalist recounted.
Bronner said that after three hours in the Gaza Strip, seeing mosques, schools, and businesses “totally destroyed,” the word that came to his mind was “annihilation of the territory.” He didn’t see a single Palestinian as the city’s population had fled to the south.
Scale of Destruction
In the light of this, the French journalist cited UN data which states that 78% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged; 77% of total road network had been damaged; and 61 million tons of debris has been generated from the conflict, 15% of which contaminated with hazardous materials.
Bronner noted that this destruction was the result of a “scorched-earth policy,” in which Israeli military’s bulldozers wiped off entire neighborhoods, alongside airstrikes and artillery bombardment.
“Ultimately, what we don’t see is, in a way, even worse, because we know that we’ve exceeded 66,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced people. So, entire towns have been partially razed,” Bronner said.
No Words Left
“I couldn’t find in my vocabulary the way to write, the way to say, what I felt in the face of something that was so enormous, so massive, so systematic that it seemed to me, at times, almost unreal,” the French journalist stated.
“Gaza is not a livable place. Humans are absent from the scene, and words are incapable of containing what has happened,” Bronner concluded.
