After the first night in Gaza for more than a year without the sound of drones or bombing overhead following the successful implementation of a ceasefire, people in the besieged Palestinian territory have begun returning to destroyed homes and searching for missing loved ones.
The truce that took effect on Sunday with the release of the first three hostages held by Hamas in exchange for 90 Palestinians from Israeli jails was greeted with euphoria as a large influx of desperately needed aid supplies entered the strip.
By Monday, however, the celebrations largely gave way to shock and sorrow, as the strip’s 2.3 million population began to assess the scale of the devastation wreaked by Israel in retaliation for the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack.
In Israel, joy at the three hostages’ safe return was tempered by anger and surprise at Hamas’s show of force at the hostage handover after 15 months of gruelling combat.
“The nation watched with no little dread when dozens of Hamas gunmen, hailed by a large cheering crowd, commandeered Gaza City’s Saraya Square for a wild, self-aggrandising daylight ceremony before a vast global audience,” a Times of Israel op-ed said.
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank opposed to the deal tried to block entrances to the Palestinian city of Ramallah on Sunday evening before the return of 90 women and children held in Israeli prisons.
Overnight, Israeli extremists set homes and cars on fire in three West Bank villages. In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said it acted “swiftly” to disperse rioters, arresting two people, a claim disputed by the human rights organisation Yesh Din.
Whether the first six-week stage of the ceasefire will hold is yet to be seen after isolated reports of violence on Monday, including what medics said was an incident in which Israeli troops shot eight people in the Rafah area. The Israeli military said it was checking the reports.
Gaza is still cut in two by the Netzarim corridor, which Israel installed below Gaza City, and the Israeli military is not expected to begin withdrawing from the area until day seven of the truce. Within northern and southern Gaza, however, displaced civilians have started making the long journey back to their towns, villages and refugee camps, by foot or using donkey-drawn carts on roads littered with unexploded ordnance.
Youssef, 22, from the northern city of Beit Lahia, who lost his parents and brother during the war, returned from Gaza City to his home on Monday.
“The first feeling I had when I reached Beit Lahia was shock and panic at the horror and rubble. It is as if a Richter nine earthquake hit my city … There are no streets, no shops, no parks, no markets, no hospitals, or municipalities. There is nothing but rubble, and some corpses around and under it,” he said.
He later went back to Gaza City. “I plan to return only when there is an environment for human living … water, food, medical services and infrastructure so we can start our lives again,” he said.
The civil defence service said on Monday that an official search was under way for about 10,000 missing people. Despite the ceasefire, the death toll in Gaza continues to climb: medics reported 62 bodies were found over the past 24 hours, bringing the number of dead to 47,000. Another 110,000 are wounded, with a quarter of those facing life-changing injuries, and 12,000 people need to be evacuated for urgent treatment elsewhere, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
About 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s October 2023 attack, and 250 taken hostage.
Umm Saber, a 48-year-old widow and mother of six, managed to return to Beit Lahia on Sunday, telling the Associated Press that she had seen several bodies on the route, some of which appeared to have been lying in the open for weeks.
Her home was completely gone, she said, adding that neighbours had already started digging through the debris in search of missing relatives believed to be buried in the rubble of Israeli airstrikes. Others were trying to clear enough space to pitch tents.
The local Kamal Adwan hospital was also “completely destroyed,” she said. “It’s no longer a hospital at all … They destroyed everything.”
Temporary relief is arriving in the form of humanitarian supplies, with 630 trucks entering the strip on Sunday almost immediately after the ceasefire came into effect at 11.15am (0915 GMT). About half of the deliveries were taken to northern Gaza, which Israel has almost completely cut off from the outside world.
Israel denies it has deliberately strangled aid supplies to the Palestinian territory, blaming aid agencies for delays and claiming Hamas siphons off deliveries.
The average number of trucks a day entering the territory had fallen to 18, leading aid agencies to warn that nine in 10 people were not accessing enough food. The minimum number of trucks a day needed to contain the strip’s humanitarian crisis is 500, the UN says, which should arrive each day of the first six-week phase of the ceasefire.
But the flow of aid could take time to increase, David Miliband, the head of the International Rescue Committee, said on Monday, citing previous problems with looting and security threats from armed gangs.
Longer-term questions about rebuilding and governance of the strip are supposed to be addressed in negotiations scheduled to begin in early February, before stage one of the ceasefire expires in early March.
According to a UN damage assessment from earlier this month, clearing more than 50m tonnes of rubble left from Israel’s bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2bn (£980m). The WHO has said that restoring Gaza’s decimated medical infrastructure will cost $10m, as only half of the strip’s 36 hospitals are still partially operating.
