From a New York Times story by Patrick Kingsley headlined “A Journey Into Northern Gaza: Ruins, Wreckage and Darkness”:

When a group of international journalists arrived at the southern fringe of Gaza City early Friday morning, riding in the back of an Israeli army jeep, we struggled to orient ourselves amid the ruins, the wreckage and the darkness.

Since leaving Israel less than an hour earlier, our jeep had bumped and lurched through a landscape so disfigured by 42 days of airstrikes and nearly three weeks of ground warfare that it was hard at times to understand where we were. House after house was missing a wall or a roof, or both. Many had simply been flattened, their concrete floors lying atop each other like a pack of playing cards.