Thousands of displaced Palestinians trek back to Gaza City amid scenes of devastation
After two years of relentless bombardment, a fragile ceasefire has taken hold in Gaza. Israeli forces have withdrawn from several districts, leaving behind not liberation, but ruin.
Thousands of displaced Palestinians are now making the long journey home, or what remains of it. They walk along broken roads, past the hollow shells of buildings that once were schools, homes, and hospitals. Many carry their lives in plastic bags or on their backs. Others pay extortionate prices for a place on a donkey cart, each clattering wheel a reminder of how far Gaza has fallen from the promise of normal life.
Some wave flags. Some raise their fingers in defiance. But most walk in silence, gaunt, weary, and hollow-eyed from months of hunger and grief. “The road is long and difficult,” says Alaa Saleh, a schoolteacher from Gaza City. “There’s no food, no water. Hiring a car costs 4,000 shekels. I left my family behind and started walking north. Thousands are struggling.”
They are not returning because it is safe. They are returning because there is nowhere else to go. Gaza’s southern shelters are overcrowded and disease-ridden; its hospitals are shells; its aid convoys sporadic and stripped bare by siege. Going home, even to rubble, feels like an act of reclamation, a way of saying we are still here.
Footage from Gaza City tells the story the politicians will not. Sheikh Radwan, Sabra, Zeitoun, names that once meant neighbourhoods, now reduced to dust. Apartment blocks flattened into anonymous grey heaps. Civil defence crews pull bodies from the ruins in silence. Children pick through debris for anything recognisable: a shoe, a photograph, a scrap of memory that proves they once belonged somewhere.
Israel’s withdrawal is not peace. It is the pause between acts. The ceasefire offers no guarantees, only an exhausted stillness that could end with the next political calculation. The siege remains. The starvation remains. The occupation remains.
Gaza today stands as both a wound and a warning, a monument to the failure of a world that speaks the language of “self-defence” while ignoring collective punishment.
For the people of Gaza, the long march home is not a victory parade. It is a pilgrimage through loss, a human procession that asks a question no ceasefire can answer: how do you rebuild a nation when the world refuses to see your humanity?
