‘This war has taken all the most precious things I had’

Scrambling over craters and towering sandbanks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families describe the long trek back home to Nedal Hamdouna inside Gaza and Bel Trew

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Clutching plastic bags of clothes, dragging suitcases in wheelbarrows, and holding their children close, Palestinian families in Gaza begin the gruelling march home for the first time since the start of Israel’s ferocious bombardment 15 months ago.

They walked day and night along two roads – one coastal, one central – that connect the north and south of the besieged strip, and which had been severed by Israeli soldiers for more than a year, but opened as part of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. The roads have been so heavily chewed up by Israeli bulldozers and tanks that, at points, it is an assault course: families have to scramble up towering sandbanks or file along bridges made from rubble over pools and craters.

Among the hundreds of thousands on the 20km trek home is Samira, just 10 years old, who says she has spent the duration of the war in Gaza on the run from bombing, which killed multiple family members. She describes ecstatic reunions as families separated by the fighting were able to see each other for the first time.

“We have been displaced maybe 20 times. I’m so tired of moving, of fleeing. I miss my home, my city, and my friends, and now I’m finally going back to them,” she says, adding that she doesn’t know how to put into words how she feels. “We just left the tent where it was in the south. In the north, our house is still standing, but it’s all burned.”

Mohamed al-Masri, 17, who was displaced from Jabalia refugee camp to Khan Younis in the south, tells The Independent his family was also travelling with no belongings.

“In our excitement to return, we left almost everything behind, even the tent. We only took what we could carry along the way,” he says, torn between feeling “joy and a sense of victory” and deep pain.