Gazans Return to Destroyed Homes as Ceasefire Takes Effect, Joy Giving Way to Shock

On Friday, after the announcement that a US-brokered ceasefire had gone into effect, thousands of Palestinians started up the Gaza Strip's coastal road toward the largely devastated north. They went on foot, on bicycles, in trucks and on donkey carts. Nearly all of Gaza's 2.2 million people were displaced at some point during two years of war, and for many of them this was the first chance to see what remained.

Some were glad simply to be going. Mahdi Saqla, 40, stood by a makeshift tent in central Gaza and acknowledged that the homes were gone. Even so, he said, returning to the place where they had stood, even over rubble, was a great joy. Mahira al-Ashi, walking the road with her family, said she had been too excited to sleep while waiting for word that they could move. She was going back to Gaza City, where she grew up. When the road opened, she said, she was very happy to return.

The mood shifted for those who arrived first. In Khan Younis, in the south, Ahmed al-Brim pushed a bicycle loaded with wood past rows of buildings crumpled by bombardment and streets strewn with debris. He described his area as exterminated and said he did not know where his family would go next. Another Khan Younis resident, Muhannad al-Shawaf, said the walk from his house to a nearby street once took three minutes. On Friday it took more than an hour, because he had to pick his way through the rubble. The destruction, he said, was indescribable, and almost everything was in ruins and unfit to live in.

Many people knew before they left their places of shelter how little would be waiting. Balqees, a mother of five from Gaza City who has been sheltering in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, told Reuters that Friday morning that the war was over but there was no home to go back to. Tens of thousands were dead and the Strip was in ruins, she said, and asked whether she was supposed to be happy. She said she was not.

Mustafa Ibrahim, an activist and human rights advocate from Gaza City, is also taking refuge in Deir al-Balah, one of the few areas in the enclave not overrun and leveled by Israeli forces. He said laughter had vanished and tears had run dry. The people of Gaza, he said, were lost, like the walking dead searching for a distant future.

Some had begun heading home even before the ceasefire took effect, and a number reached Sheikh Radwan, a northwest suburb of Gaza City. Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, went on Friday morning to check on his house and was amazed to find it still standing, though surrounded by what he called a sea of rubble. In a voice note to Reuters he said his neighbors' houses were destroyed and entire districts were gone.

The war began in October 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 67,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead. That toll cannot be verified, and it does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. Israel says it had killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August, plus another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack. Israel says it seeks to minimize civilian deaths and argues that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, fighting from homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel's own toll in the ground offensive and in operations along the border stands at 472, including two police officers and three Defense Ministry civilian contractors. For Gaza's returnees, the question now is where they will live, since in many neighborhoods the first task is finding anything left standing.