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Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians moved north on Monday after Israeli forces withdrew from portions of a militarised corridor that has for months divided Gaza into two.
For some, the only way home was on foot, or on the back of the donkey carts that have become a crucial mode of transportation in fuel-starved Gaza during the 15-month war between Israel and Hamas. Some carried their few possessions, others their children.
Israeli troops had withdrawn to the eastern edge of the strip early on Monday, leaving open a path through the Netzarim corridor, named after a settlement Israel abandoned in 2005. They walked under a banner that read “Welcome to Gaza”.
A little further north, the Salah al-Din road, one of two major arteries that ran north-south, those lucky enough to afford a car, a taxi or a litre of fuel passed through Israeli scanners intended to stop Hamas militants from bringing weapons to the north.
It’s unclear how many will stay in the north, given how little exists there to sustain life: food aid has only now started to reach the north, as part of a ceasefire agreed earlier this month. Hospitals are shuttered, and more than 80 per cent of the homes there are completely destroyed, satellite images show.
“It was a very difficult moment — to see so many thousands of my people cross to the north, I was crying like a child,” said Mostafa al-Deeb, a father of four who travelled north to his old home.
The north had been emptied bit-by-bit, with entire neighbourhoods forced to evacuate ahead of advancing Israeli forces, sometimes repeatedly, until only a few tens of thousands of civilians remained — out of a population previously estimated to be about 1mn.
Those who returned encountered ruins, a desolate landscape methodically destroyed by the Israeli military in their offensives against Hamas. Many struggled to find their homes in the mass of debris, as a few bulldozers dug through the ruins only to excavate the uncounted dead.
It is also unclear how long they will be able to stay. The ceasefire agreement is not a complete end to the conflict, which requires complex negotiations in which Hamas must agree to free male hostages, including soldiers, in exchange for Israel ending the war.
Yet to some, the march was a great victory in itself, denying Israel an outcome Palestinians had long warned about: a repeat of the mass displacement of 1948, known in Arabic as the Nakba, when some 750,000 fled their homes in what eventually became Israel.
For them, Monday’s return north, however painful, was a small triumph. “We prove once again that Palestinians show steadfastness and resilience,” said 50-year old Abou Mohammad Hekmat. “We will not allow another Nakba.”
For now, Hamas has proclaimed this the first stage in their victory over Israel, pyrrhic though it may be. “For the first time in the history of our conflict with Israel, Palestinians return to their homes,” a Hamas leader told an Arab TV channel.
But for others, whatever relief they felt was not enough to compensate for the loss. Al-Deeb, after witnessing the ruins of his prior life, returned quickly to his family in a tent city in southern Gaza. “There is no life left in the north, no way to survive,” he told his wife. It was, said al-Deeb, “a very emotional and catastrophic day.”
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