‘Nothing left’: Desperate scenes in destroyed Gaza City neighbourhoods
The scenes here are desperate – joy mixed with devastation and grief following the ceasefire.
Many of the people who are returning now have come to assess the damage and determine whether their families can return to Gaza City – but they’re encountering a harsh and heartbreaking reality.
They said they’d found nothing left of their neighbourhoods and the areas they once called home, they can’t even recognise them. This is what Israel’s war has left behind, complete devastation – and people are returning to nothing but rubble.
Many families also said they can’t even afford the high price of returning to the north because two years of Israel’s war have stripped them of every possible way of earning an income.
They lack basic necessities like food, clean water and a place to stay. And beyond all of that, the sense of safety and stability. They need medical care and the aid trucks to come into Gaza City.
So many people are now facing a new reality, just securing the basic necessities for their family to survive the next day.
Destroyed buildings and rubble are seen in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City
Palestinians’ return to north Gaza is act against Israel’s ‘settler colonial project’
Palestinians trying to make their way back to northern Gaza is not just an act of survival, but also their identity as Palestinians, and especially as refugees, says Tamer Qarmout, an associate professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
“Seventy percent of Gaza’s population descend from Palestinian refugees who left the villages and towns in 1948 and 1967 during all the wars of establishing Israel,” Qarmout told Al Jazeera.
“Israel is a settler colonial project, so they want the land without the people … Since the onset of this genocidal war, [the goal] has been to empty Gaza of its people.”
What it now means is that Palestinians are returning north and are hanging on “to the land, hanging on to their rights, hanging on to everything they believe in”, he added.
There is generational trauma from when Palestinians were forced to leave their lands in the early wars of establishing Israel, Qarmout explained.
“Thousands of them left carrying just their keys, thinking that they will be able to return in days or weeks, and they never returned,” he said. “So this generation inherited this trauma, inherited this massive loss, and they are adamant not to do it again.”
Palestinians flash the V for victory sign as they make their way to Gaza City through the so-called Netzarim Corridor from Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip
