Gazans march north again, returning to homes made of rubble
It was the moment everyone in southern Gaza had been waiting for: the chance to return to their homes, or what remained of them, in Gaza City and northern Gaza. On October 10, as part of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas, throngs of people began the march back north, moving up the coastal al-Rashid road in a sight reminiscent of Gazans’ historic return march during the January-March ceasefire earlier this year.
On Saturday morning, a statement from the Gaza Civil Defense said that over 300,000 people had made the trek to Gaza City over the past two days.
“No tents or mobile homes are available to house the returnees from the south,” the statement said.
Ismail Thawabta, head of the Government Media Office in Gaza, confirmed that over 300,000 residential units have been destroyed in Gaza, while 200,000 units were partially destroyed. “This led to the displacement of almost two million people from their homes, forcing them to live in tents and in harsh conditions,” the statement said.
‘This war broke us’
The return movement is not limited to the southern areas of the Strip. Residents from Gaza City and Khan Younis have also begun to return to neighborhoods from which they were displaced during the war, including eastern Khan Younis, Ma’an, and al-Batna Samin. Those areas had previously been inaccessible due to Israel’s military presence there. As the Israeli army has withdrawn from parts of the territory, displaced families are attempting to reclaim what remains of their homes.
Those returning describe a mix of relief and devastation. “We walked eight hours to reach our neighborhood in al-Shuja’iyya,” said Mahmoud Wady, one of the returnees. “When we arrived, we were shocked by the destruction. My home is gone, and the entire area has been flattened. Still, we are grateful to be back and to know that the bombing has stopped, but we are terrified over so many things — our lives, our children, our future. We don’t know whether we will live in a tent again for a long while or not. We have no sense of what the future holds. But we are grateful and happy that the war has ended.”
Wady, like many others, has begun gathering wood and fabric to build a makeshift tent near the ruins of his home. “We don’t know where to go. We don’t know if schools still exist or whether they’ve all been destroyed. None of us knows what the future looks like,” he said.
Mahmoud Barbakh, a resident of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, returned to his neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. He said that four months ago, when he evacuated, his neighborhood was still livable. Now there’s nothing left.
“There’s no life here,” he said. “All we ask is for the world to help us clear the ruins to make it possible again for us to live with our families and for our children to grow up here.”
Wady reflects on what he and his loved ones have witnessed over the past two years and what it has done to them. “This war broke us,” he said. “It damaged our souls. We need decades to heal, and we need even more decades to rebuild our homes.”
“But we will do it,” he added.
Social unrest amid initial Israeli withdrawal
On the ground, Gaza’s Interior Ministry announced that a new security plan for the Strip would be implemented as Israeli forces began to withdraw. The Interior Ministry and the National Security forces in Gaza said in a statement that security forces will be deployed in the areas where the Israeli army withdrew to secure both public and private property and to manage the deliberate chaos created by the Israeli army during the war.
When Israel broke the previous ceasefire in March and resumed its genocidal campaign, one of the chief targets of Israeli forces was civil servants in Gaza working under the Ministry of Interior, which included the Gaza police force and internal security forces. The systematic targeting of Hamas’s means of ensuring civil order was intended to create a power vacuum in Gaza and sow chaos among the local populace. The Israeli army also funded and armed local criminal gangs in Gaza, as well as a number of local clans, to fight Hamas and loot humanitarian aid in the Strip, further deepening social polarization.
The effects of those long months of social disintegration are now being felt. As the war winds down and the Israeli army withdraws from designated areas, clashes and infighting between Hamas members and local clans have broken out in parts of Gaza. During the war, the Ministry of Interior had established the Arrow Force, an internal security unit meant to fight aid looters as well as clan members that Hamas accuses of collaborating with Israel. On Friday, members of the Arrow Force raided the residence of the Dogmosh family in Gaza City. On the same day, clashes erupted between Hamas members and other families in Deir al-Balah, resulting in the death of a Hamas member.
Hamas’s redeployment in the Gaza Strip caused fear among some groups that had been directly working with the Israeli army throughout the war, most infamous among them the hundreds of armed men in eastern Rafah led by Yasser Abu Shabab, another group led by Hussam al-Asthal, and several others.
Social media users in Gaza mocked Yasser Abu Shabab’s group as the war’s greatest losers, amid reports that the Israeli army will not be evacuating them from Gaza to protect them from Hamas reprisal.
On the humanitarian front, the Israeli-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), ceased operations as Israeli forces withdrew. The GHF has been responsible for the killing of over a thousand Palestinian aid-seekers at its so-called humanitarian aid distribution points, which have been described as “death traps” by Palestinians. On Friday evening, photos circulating online showed GHF workers dismantling the Foundation’s facilities in preparation to leave the Strip, confirming that the GHF would be left out of aid distribution during the ceasefire.
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