Reporting amid the ruins at Gaza's 'yellow line'

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00:00An insight into what's happening inside the Gaza Strip.

00:03It was controlled access with the Israel military,

00:06but nonetheless a rare chance to take a critical first-hand look at the landscape.

00:10Nogatana Polskyi made this journey for us.

00:16Behind me, you can see what remains of the Gaza City suburb of Shujia,

00:23a place where hundreds of thousands of people used to live.

00:26There are still one or two trees that remain standing.

00:30And we're told by the Israeli army spokesperson

00:32that the yellow line is located right behind that first line of buildings behind me.

00:38Of course, if it's almost impossible for us to discern,

00:41it's equally impossible for any of the people on the ground to be able to make sense of.

00:47And that has caused quite a few of the killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces

00:53during these past weeks of the ceasefire.

00:56The Israeli army spokespeople who have brought us into this area

01:00are emphasizing how many breaches of the contract were done by Hamas,

01:09including weapons that have been restocked in this area and some of the tunnels.

01:15Nogatana Polskyi in Gaza a little earlier.

01:18The destruction behind her that she was speaking about is very clear to see.

01:24And Nogatana Polskyi joins us now live from Jerusalem for more on her visit to Gaza,

01:29embedded with the Israeli military, but nonetheless a trip that was important to take

01:33in order to see firsthand the scale of the destruction.

01:37You saw it and you've told us, talked us through what you were seeing in a very emotive way there.

01:44Before you go loose talking more about that,

01:46can I just ask you to just basically clarify for people who may not know precisely what is the yellow line?

01:55Yes, and we learned quite a bit about it today.

01:58The yellow line is a line that is defined in the Trump ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.

02:08It's the agreement that in fact ended fire, ended the active part of the war about three weeks ago now.

02:17However, the agreement was put together very quickly.

02:22And in the several maps that we were shown today by the Israeli military representatives,

02:27some on the record, some off the record, it became clear that the yellow line is something that is hastily drawn

02:34and it didn't appear that there was a really clear perimeter for it.

02:40This became even much more, I would say, stark when we were in Sujaia, the images you just showed,

02:48and Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, the spokesperson for the army, pointed us really to something invisible.

02:57To a place where the line should be, if it was impossible for us to discern exactly where that line is,

03:04and it is impossible for the army to know, there's no yellow sign, there are no blocks stopping people from crossing.

03:12There's no physical barrier at this line.

03:15It's a conceptual line.

03:17This may explain how many people have been killed, how many Palestinian civilians, the Israeli army claims terrorists as well.

03:27Today, while we were there, in fact, the Israeli army announced that in the area in which we were visiting,

03:33two, I'm quoting now, two terrorists were killed crossing this yellow line.

03:37But there is no yellow line.

03:39The yellow line is in the sight of the beholder.

03:43And this is just one of these lacuna, one of these loose sections in the agreement,

03:49such as another one, who will disarm Hamas, right?

03:53Hamas is clearly still armed and active.

03:56So it was clear how, while the ceasefire is real and the war for now has come to a stop,

04:05how, in a way, this is all held together by cobwebs and really unclear, I would say, ideas and aspirations,

04:15but the real mechanisms to turn this ceasefire into a complete and total end to that part of this conflict,

04:24you know, absolutely was not visible in this visit to Gaza today.

04:28Where your look was going, the place behind you as you were speaking to us,

04:32I mean, clearly there, Noga, houses used to be there, people's communities used to be there,

04:36shops, businesses, that was where people lived.

04:41Yes, in fact, the entire line of the panorama behind me, you know,

04:46for any of our viewers who can zoom in a little bit, what you see is a wasteland,

04:52is simply mounds of rubble.

04:54And it's not just on the ground, Mark.

04:57This also reflects the quality of the air, as astonishing it is to say that.

05:01But because there are no structures, no signs of civilization left in this entire area,

05:08and instead we have just mounds of earth and rubble,

05:13the quality of the air, it's very, very filled with dust.

05:15There's nothing to impede the dust, and there is only dust.

05:19We didn't see a single civilian.

05:21Of course, we weren't able to interact with anyone.

05:23But you have this otherworldly sense being there with very little explanations.

05:30We weren't expecting significant explanations from the Israeli army,

05:34for whom it has simply become a matter of course that Gaza has been completely and totally destroyed,

05:43or most of it has.

05:44Certainly, the parts we saw were completely destroyed.

05:48And there are no explanations offered.

05:51That extent of destruction has stopped with the ceasefire.

05:56But again, the devastation of the area, and also, I have to say, right behind us,

06:02the still existing risks for the Israeli communities that were minutes away from us.

06:10In fact, to go into Gaza, we crossed through the same, you know, wire fence

06:15that the Hamas terrorists crossed through on October 7th, 2023.

06:19It was striking to see the same structure or rebuilt version of it that we crossed through.

06:24But those communities, it appears, from everything we were able to see,

06:29certainly remain at very significant risk.

06:33Nogatana Polsky, as always, thank you very much for the clarity and the insight that you bring

06:38to what is and continues to be an incredibly testing and difficult story to report.

06:44Nogatana Polsky, our correspondent in Jerusalem,

06:46will watch you, of course, for all developments on the situation in the Middle East.

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