On the morning of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, 22-year-old Ahmed Arian got into his car and drove south to his hometown of Rafah, where he had fled eight months earlier.
As he approached, the pile of rubble grew larger, closing in on him until he could no longer see the path. He parked his car and continued on foot.
He walked through old haunts such as Tal Al Sultan, Al Balad and Al Genein before arriving in his district of Brazil. There was no trace of the park that once stood on the corner of the street. There were only two houses still standing in the entire neighborhood. He wasn’t in it.
Ariane knew it would be bad, but she didn’t expect it to be in the wasteland that she did it to. “All we saw were ruins,” he said. “The city will be destroyed.”
During the months of war, nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians like Aryan longed for home. In recent months, donkey car drivers, the main taxi service, have been calling out the names of places all Gazans know they cannot go to since fuel ran out in the besieged enclave – caught up in the fighting. such as Beit Hanoun in the northern part of the country where they were lost – an expression of a desire to return.
With the ceasefire taking effect on Sunday, some are finally able to do so. But from Rafah in the south to Jabalia in the north, that sense of relief was undermined by the scale of losses. Where once there were roads, stores, and gardens, people found only sand, twisted metal, and shredded concrete.
Despite surviving day and night bombing, people never expected the place they knew to become so unrecognizable.
The five-story apartment building where Ariane grew up with her grandmother, uncles, and cousins had a balcony with pale pink curtains, usually pulled back to let in the sunlight. All that was left was a pile of rubble, on which Ariane was determined to survive somehow.
“As a family, we intend to come back. We have no intention of leaving our home or our land,” Ariane said. “We want to go back, but now we have no infrastructure, no sewerage, no water.”
The 15-month war has devastated Gaza more than any previous Israeli offensive. Palestinian health authorities say around 47,000 people have been killed since Israel launched an onslaught in response to a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and Israeli officials say 1,200 people have died in the attack. It is said that a person died.
Approximately 1.9 million of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to flee. The United Nations says 92 percent of homes have been destroyed or damaged, estimates there are more than 50 million tonnes of debris and removal could take up to 21 years and cost around $1 billion. .
Basma Mahdi, 45, who was forced to flee from Beit Lakhia in the north to Gaza City, began to follow her neighbors back on the morning of the ceasefire. It felt unreal, like a dream. “Entire buildings and streets disappeared,” she said. “I just wanted to close my eyes so I couldn’t see anything.”
For some, returning also means a new reckoning. Palestinians who re-entered the abandoned area found the bodies of their loved ones crushed under the ruins of their homes. The Gaza Civil Defense Authority said 10,000 bodies were still trapped under the rubble.
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There is no clear plan for postwar reconstruction. The massive task of simply clearing the rubble depends on the longevity of the ceasefire, which is in its initial six-week phase.
Phases two and three negotiations are still needed to bring the war to a permanent end before reconstruction can begin, but they are not guaranteed. It is also unclear where the huge amount of money needed will come from. This has left Palestinians wondering how long they will have to live in tents built on the debris of their homes.
“Tonight we will sleep in an abandoned house. It’s a ruin, but it’s still our home,” Mahdi said. “I’m very happy to have a cease-fire agreement. . . . But nothing will work out for us until a long time has passed.”
The right of Gazans to return to their land was a key tenet of the ceasefire agreement, and many feared a repeat of the mass dispossession that followed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
However, many people cannot even begin this process yet. Under the agreement, Palestinians will have to wait a week before crossing the Israeli barrier known as the Netzarim Corridor, which separates north and south.
Khalil al-Madhoun, 43, was stranded after fleeing Gaza City to the Nuseyrat camp south of Netzarim.
“I’ve known for months that my apartment was destroyed, but I’m going to look for mementos in the ruins,” he said.
People taking shelter in rented homes are scrambling to make other arrangements before their owners return across the border.
Another group from the Gaza Strip, which is still occupied by Israeli forces, risked their lives to get a glimpse of their homeland, only to flee back to displacement camps.
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A year before the war began, police officer Abu Al-Bara’a bought land in the Al-Balad district of his hometown of Rafah and built a house for himself, his wife, and children. He arranged it and planted trees in the garden.
The day the war ended, he returned to where his new home was. It was in a strip of the city along the Egyptian border that has been designated a no-go zone by Israel, known as the Philadelphia Corridor.
He managed to get to within 300 meters of his home before an Israeli quadcopter started firing in his direction, but the rubble of all the destroyed buildings was piled high in front of him and he wondered what was going on. I couldn’t see if there were any left.
