Gunfire and explosions followed by unsettling silence: Sky News reports from inside Gaza City

There is a loud boom, the noise of an explosion, followed by the rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire.

Another explosion, more distant. A sign on the wall warns people against snipers. And all around us is the rubble of destruction.

Welcome to Tel al-Hawa, once one of the most affluent suburbs of Gaza City. Now wrecked, uninhabitable and destroyed.

Like so much of Gaza – and like all the places we drove through to get here – it is a wasteland. Buildings reduced to rubble, with a layer of dust covering everything.

The only people you see are Israeli soldiers.

Throughout my day in Gaza, I didn’t see a single Gazan.

Partly that’s because we were there with the Israeli military, who controlled all our movements. Partly it’s because places like this have been so completely wrecked that everyone has fled.

I came here on Friday afternoon, along with journalists from a variety of media outlets from around the world.

There was no sign that, a few hours later, Hamas would offer a response to the Trump peace plan, nor that there would be a surge of global optimism.

Because here, amid the dust and debris, everything is bleak and threatening. Everywhere you look there is devastation. The filaments of war are everywhere.

Gaza latest: World leaders welcome Hamas response to US peace deal

The soundscape is military. There are the roars of explosions, bursts of gunfire, the buzz of drones, the clatter of troops crunching through rubble and the roar of the engines that power tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs).

But every now and then there is silence. No birdsong, no gentle chatter. Nothing. It is unsettling.

The proof that people ever lived here is strewn around, as if a plane has crashed. There are scraps of everyday life – a milk carton, a phone cable, a shoe. A red toy car.

And curiously, amid all this horror, there is a bouquet of red roses. They are artificial, of course, but they lie in the street, dusty and forgotten. What were they for? A party, a wedding? Or just to brighten up a home that has now been blown away.

Booby traps, snipers on roofs

We spoke to Israeli military officials, who told us they had only recently taken control of this area.

The picture they paint of Hamas fighters is that of a depleted fighting force, reduced to maybe 2,000 people, including young and inexperienced conscripts.

Their tactics are those of a guerrilla force – snipers on roofs, booby traps, improvised explosive devices.

“But it can work. We had a soldier killed very near here a couple of weeks ago. And Hamas – they are brave,” he says.

“It is hard for us to have fought for two years, but it is harder for Hamas than us. We are strong enough to finish this war, bring the hostages back, eliminate Hamas and ensure 7 October can never happen again.”

The military has occupied a building that was once either a large house or perhaps a series of apartments. Some of the rooms are simply forgotten, others are used by the IDF for offices, meals or meetings.

At the top of the building is a room with a large picture window. It looks out towards the Jordanian Hospital – the only building here, and I think the only building I saw throughout my visit that is unscathed.

The soldiers show us drone footage from inside the hospital campus, revealing a tunnel opening. Twenty metres below the ground, they say, was a Hamas workshop for designing and building missiles and rockets.

“It’s very significant,” one of the soldiers tells me, his face obscured by a balaclava. “The weapons manufactured here are being fired at our civilians. To find it here, under the compound with the hospital, shows how Hamas is using civilians to hide behind.

“We cannot attack that,” – he points at the hospital – “we don’t want to hurt the people there. It’s very significant to us as Israelis and also to the citizens of Gaza, who are being used by Hamas.”

An IDF official told me the hospital had also been used to “accommodate” between 50 and 80 Hamas fighters, and said Jordanian Hospital officials “definitely knew” about these people.

We later put these allegations to a Jordanian official source, who described the hospital’s work as “purely a humanitarian mission” that “has been providing treatment for tens of thousands of Gazans since 2009”.

“Jordan has no knowledge of the presence of tunnels under the location of the Tel al-Hawa hospital. Gaza is riddled with tunnels.

“There was no access into the hospital from any underground tunnels. Over its 16 years of operation, no fighters were present within the hospital’s premises.”

Looking out over the hellish landscape of this shattered town, I could understand why some would think twice before rushing back.

Yet Richard Hecht did. Formerly the spokesperson for the IDF, Hecht, whose family moved from Glasgow to Israel when he was a boy, had been called at 11pm the previous evening and asked to accompany us.

We talked, with dust billowing around us at a military compound on the outskirts of Gaza City.

“I hope this war comes to an end, and it would stop in a matter of moments if Hamas returned our hostages,” he told me.

“But the IDF is very determined – we want our hostages back. We are doing everything we can because we have to fight Hamas. What alternative do we have? We need to obliterate this group.”

I suggest to him Israel’s military action now looks wildly disproportionate, especially bearing in mind they believe Hamas to now have only a couple of thousand fighters.

More than 65,000 people have been killed in Gaza, half of them women and children. And many, including a UN commission, have claimed this is genocide.

Hecht bristles. “That is an atrocious thing to say. Genocide has intent, it entails intent. It is an atrocious accusation and I cannot connect it. We are fighting Hamas. We are not fighting Palestinians.”

We have to leave. This town is regarded as an active conflict zone, and the regular chorus of gunfire and explosions testifies to that.

We clamber back into the APC, crewed by two men in their early 20s. One drives, the other stands up, using a hatch to access a machine gun based on the roof. He beckons me up to see the view.

Around us, a line of military vehicles. A digger comes into view, and then a plume of dust flies up as the APC reverses. I look down and see hundreds of spent casings around the machine gun. I point at them, and he nods slowly.

We drive away. The dust envelopes the vehicles again, and we leave Gaza City behind us.

As we head back towards the border, to the gates that divide a war zone from Israeli towns and kibbutzim, we see a huge plume of smoke rising a mile or two away.

In Gaza, the concept of peace feels almost unthinkable.