Tens of thousands face a bitter homecoming

When the Gaza ceasefire took effect a week ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians began to move from the sprawling camps in the south back to their homes in Gaza City and the surrounding urban areas further north. For most, it was a shocking and bitter homecoming.

- Seham Tantesh, Julian Borger

A month after they had been ordered out by Israeli forces, Palestinians filled the coastal road northwards, which became a solid river of people, mostly trudging on foot, carrying the few possessions they had salvaged from one displacement after another.

What the returnees found on arrival was complete desolation. Large swathes of the north had simply been flattened. Their homes and neighbourhoods were no longer recognisable. Their communities had been erased.

The sheer scale of demolition left families with an awful dilemma: stay and seek shelter in the shattered stumps of their former homes, or return to the tented camps in the south where they at least had a better chance of finding food and water. And looming over that decision was the great unknown of how long the truce would last, and whether it would ever take hold as a lasting peace.

“I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground,” Suhair al-Absi, a 50-year-old mother of seven, said on arrival to the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City.

“The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.” The al-Absi family had clung to their home until the last minute as the Israeli army pressed forward through Gaza City in September, supposedly to crush any vestiges of Hamas.