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Just hours after the two-week offensive on Gaza City’s Shujaiya district ended, Palestinians had already found 60 bodies as they picked through the piles of concrete and dust left behind, officials in Hamas-run Gaza said Thursday.

Families of missing residents and civil defence agency crews moved in for the grim search after Israel announced late Wednesday that it had ended its operation there against Hamas.

‘Once the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from the Shujaiya neighbourhood, civil defence crews, with local residents, managed to recover about 60 martyrs up to now,’ agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.

Some 85 per cent of buildings are now ‘uninhabitable’ and Shujaiya has been turned into a ‘disaster zone’, he added, estimating that 120,000 people had been left homeless.

Residents who returned found a ghost town.

Sabrin Abu Asr said the district was ‘in ruins’ as she went back to see the debris of her home.

Like most buildings, only a skeletal frame remained after two weeks of clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants that forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

The rest lay collapsed in piles of crushed concrete, cinder blocks and twisted rebar.

A full evacuation order was issued for Shujaiya on June 27. Since then, Israel has warned that all of Gaza City will remain a ‘dangerous’ combat zone.

Israeli military offensive has killed at least 38,345 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry.

G7 foreign ministers condemned on Thursday the move by Israel to legalise five outposts in the West Bank, and slammed its decision to expand existing settlements and establish new ones.

Settlement expansion has increased sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the helm of a hardline pro-settler coalition.

‘We, the G7 Foreign Ministers... join the UN and the European Union in condemning the announcement by Israeli Finance Minister (Bezalel) Smotrich that five outposts are to be legalised in the West Bank,’ read a statement that also rejected Israel’s decision to declare over 1,270 hectares (3,100 acres) as ‘state lands’.

It called the latter ‘the largest such declaration of state land since the Oslo Accords.’

The foreign ministers of the Group of Seven rich nations also criticised Israel’s decision ‘to expand existing settlements in the occupied West Bank by 5,295 new housing units and to establish three new settlements.’

It called Israel’s settlement programme ‘inconsistent with international law, and counterproductive to the cause of peace.’

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and established settlements that are deemed illegal under international law.

Not counting annexed east Jerusalem, more than 490,000 settlers live in the West Bank alongside three million Palestinians.

The United States on Thursday imposed new sanctions against Israeli extremists over violence against Palestinians, including slapping financial restrictions on four settlement outposts in the West Bank.

The State Department also blacklisted Lehava, which it described as the ‘largest violent extremist organization in Israel’ with more than 10,000 members.

‘We strongly encourage the government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable. In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures,’ State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

The Israeli government recently approved three wildcat outposts, in what the Peace Now watchdog called a new step toward ‘annexation’ of the West Bank.

The United States is ‘moving forward’ with sending 500-pound bombs to Israel after a pause over concerns that 2,000-pound munitions in the same shipment could be used in populated areas, a US official said Thursday.

Washington halted the bomb shipment in early May when it appeared Israel was on the verge of a major ground operation in Rafah in southern Gaza that the US government strongly opposed, with Israel eventually launching a more limited incursion instead.

‘We’ve been clear that our concern has been on the end-use of the 2,000-pound bombs, particularly in advance of Israel’s Rafah campaign which they have announced they are concluding,’ the US official said on condition of anonymity.

‘Because of how these shipments are put together, other munitions may sometimes be co-mingled. That’s what happened here with the 500-pound bombs,’ the official said, adding: ‘Because our concern was not about the 500-pound bombs, those are moving forward as part of the usual process.’

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused President Joe Biden’s administration of slowing down weapons deliveries to Israel, which has been at war in Gaza since an October 7 attack by Hamas.

US officials denied the accusations, saying that the bomb shipment was the only one affected, with the two sides later signaling progress on resolving the rift.

The United States is Israel’s main military backer, but the White House has voiced frustration over the rising civilian death toll in Gaza, where Israel has conducted more than nine months of operations against Hamas.