It is a breathtaking and, at points, pretty perilous journey through the remote mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan.

We’re trying to reach the Mazar Dara valley, where an earthquake wiped out whole villages. The force of the quake ripped apart roads, cut off communities and buried multiple generations.

It’s slow going – navigating around sheer drops on a road scattered with rocks and boulders. But after three hours, we start to see the first signs of the disaster that, within minutes, plunged this region into darkness.

We are driving into Wadir, a village in Nurgal District, where everyone we meet has lost someone. The earthquake, which struck around midnight, killed many in their sleep here, especially women and children.

Standing by a makeshift graveyard peppered with white flags and gravestones, we meet little Rahmanullah. He’s eight but looks much younger, and his glassy eyes look heavy with grief.

His fragile, tiny hands point to the grave where his six-year-old brother Abouzar is buried. He was sleeping alongside him.

The only reason Rahmanullah survived was because his older sibling, Saied Rahman, was able to pull him out.

“I was asleep when I heard a crash,” Rahmanullah tells me. “My brother said ‘it’s an earthquake, get up, or the building will fall on you’.

“He took my hand and pulled me out, put me on some wood, and said, ‘get out quick’.”

Rahmanullah takes us up a steep hill to show us what remains of his home.

On the edge of a vast drop, it is now a mound of rubble – only a broken bed and shoes left behind.

The earthquake killed some 2,000 people and was one of the worst Afghanistan has seen. And it came at an already desperate time for Afghans – with an economic crisis, rising unemployment, drought and malnutrition.

In Afghanistan, there has been a seemingly endless cycle of hunger and displacement. Compounding those problems since the Taliban took control in 2021, aid has dropped off a cliff.

This year, the US cut almost all of its funding to the country, and it’s had a massive impact.

The demise of the US Agency for International Development this year has forced the closure of 400 health facilities and left hundreds of thousands of Afghans without consistent access to food.

Nearly everyone we spoke to in this region praised the speed and effectiveness of the Taliban response – the government sending in helicopters to evacuate the injured and the dead.

White tents have sprouted up next to each affected village too – a sign international aid was able to get to these far-flung communities against the odds.

But winter is coming, and sickness is starting to spread. In Andarlackhak, we meet Ajeebah. She’s keen to speak to us in private, in the tent she now calls home.

She married at 10 years old and went on to have 10 children. But five of them died in the quake – three-year-old Shabhana, seven-year-old Wali Khan, nine-year-old twins Razimah and Nasreen, and 13-year-old Saleha.

Their mother is clearly still processing the immense, almost unimaginable loss.

“I don’t want to bury them. What could I do?” she says. “I can’t keep them outside. But I don’t want to put them in a graveyard.”

Outside, dozens of children are playing, many orphaned by the disaster.

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Malnutrition is a major issue in Afghanistan and keeping these children fed will be an overwhelming burden in the months ahead.

With women unable to work under the Taliban and a struggling economy, families were already in dire straits.

Mohammad Salem, who’s 45, has injured his foot. And he’s deeply worried about the months ahead.

“We don’t have anything for winter,” he said. “The snow is coming, and our children are living in tents.

“They’re lying in the dirt. We don’t have any shelter for the future. Everything we had is destroyed.”

The Taliban forbids physical contact between men and women who are not family members, even in emergencies. That raised fears some women would be left without help.

However, the villagers we spoke to praised the rescue efforts and said female aid workers were able to reach them.

But what hangs over every community in these deep and now scarred valleys is the fear of the hardships to come and the realisation that their communities, their families, have been changed forever.

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.

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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.”

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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.”

There are many stories of Israeli reserve soldiers saying they are both weary and wary, reluctant to sign up for another tour of duty.

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.

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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.

At least 30 people have been injured in a Russian drone strike on a Ukrainian railway station, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.

Two trains were hit when Shostka station was targeted on Saturday, the head of Ukraine’s railways, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, said in a Facebook post.

Three children were among the passengers injured, he said, adding an employee had also been hurt.

Ukraine’s president wrote on X: “A savage Russian drone strike on the railway station in Shostka, Sumy region.

“All emergency services are already on the scene and have begun helping people. All information about the injured is being established.

“So far, we know of at least 30 victims. Preliminary reports indicate that both Ukrzaliznytsia staff and passengers were at the site of the strike.”

Regional governor Oleh Hryhorov said a train heading to Kyiv had been hit and that medics and rescuers were working on the scene.

Mr Zelenskyy and the governor posted pictures from the scene that show a passenger carriage on fire.

The head of the local district administration, Oksana Tarasiuk, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster that about 30 people
were injured by the strike. No fatalities were reported in the immediate aftermath.

Mr Pertsovskyi said the strikes were a “despicable attack aimed at stopping communication with our frontline communities”.

Moscow has stepped up its air strike campaign on Ukraine’s railway infrastructure, hitting it almost every day over the last two months.

They have also targeted energy infrastructure with a massive bombardment on Ukraine’s gas production facilities earlier this week.

Mr Zelenskyy’s top aide, Andriy Yermak, accused Russia of deliberately targeting the station and train, saying it was carrying out a “war against civilians”.

Overnight into Saturday, Russian drones and missiles pounded Ukraine’s power grid, a Ukrainian energy firm said.

The strike damaged energy facilities near Chernihiv, a northern city west of Shostka that lies close to the Russian border, and sparked blackouts set to affect some 50,000 households, according to regional operator Chernihivoblenergo.

On Friday, Russia carried out what officials have described as the biggest attack on Ukraine’s natural gas facilities since the war started in February 2022.

Russia fired a total of 381 drones and 35 missiles at Ukraine on Friday, according to Ukraine’s air force, in what officials said was an attempt to wreck the Ukrainian power grid ahead of winter.