When Suhair al-Najjar, 32, said, essentially, “I curse both sides,” and described Hamas as “shoes,” a sharp insult, an older man strode over to scold her. “Don’t say ‘Hamas,’ say ‘the Arab leaders,’ ” he yelled.

Ms. Najjar, who lost 30 relatives along with her home in Khuza’a, a village of 10,000 on Gaza’s eastern border that was demolished, was not deterred. “I’m angry at the two sides,” she repeated. “I’m angry at everybody, all the countries.” The bearded man in a gray jalabiya came closer and demanded, “You need someone to teach you how to talk?”

The conversation unfolded on the steps of a crushed concrete house among rows of similarly destroyed homes lining a street whose asphalt was torn up by the Israeli invasion. The dome of a nearby mosque sat tilted on the ground, along with the town’s water tank. The metal archway that once spanned the street to welcome visitors was a twisted heap.

Ahmad al-Najjar, 44, used to drive a horse-drawn cart, but his horse was killed in an Israeli attack. So his four small children, including a yet-unnamed baby born during this war, slept in the horse’s shed during the brief truce. Mr. Najjar said he and his neighbors “do not allow the resistance to strike from here” and the idea that Hamas might have built tunnels under their homes “bothers me.” The fighting, he said, had only pushed Gaza backward from its goals.

“So far nothing has been achieved, we don’t know what they are doing there,” Mr. Najjar said of the Cairo talks, where the Palestinian delegation includes members of Hamas as well as the Fatah party of the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. “These are parties — Fatah, Hamas, Israel are parties. We are people. We are victims. If these parties have differences, why do we pay the price of their differences?”

Farther south in Rafah’s Al Showqa neighborhood, two bulldozers and a digger were searching for bodies in a tunnel used for an Aug. 1 attack that killed three Israeli soldiers, one of whom was thought captured by Hamas, prompting a huge assault that left more than 100 dead over two days. Near the tunnel’s mouth, Fadi Abu Al-Roos, who works as a clerk for the United Nations, returned to his peach-and-white tiled home to find “Storeroom position” written in Hebrew on what remained of the outside wall. Inside, a framed cross-stitch “God Bless Our Home,” in English, was hanging intact amid the ruins.

“I don’t see it as a victory or a defeat,” he said. “It’s only destruction.”

Perhaps a mile away, what had been two acres of orange, guava, olive and clementine groves were, in the wake of the Israeli attacks, mounds of sand marked by bulldozer tracks. On one hill, there were pieces of two uniforms — one Israeli, the other Hamas — an empty packet of Next cigarettes with Hebrew letters, and five fresh eggs where, Wissam Abu Asun surmised, “A chicken must have died.”