(27 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
++QUALITY AS INCOMING++
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rashid Street, Wadi Gaza – 27 January 2025
1. Various of people returning to northern Gaza carrying Palestinian flag
2. Various of people carrying belongings
3. Various of people near houses, tents
4. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) No name given, man returning to northern Gaza:
"This is our house, it’s a pile of rubble. We didn’t take any money or clothes or anything, we left them all in there, under the rubble. We left the tents behind only to come here to other tents. This is our house, four storeys, you can’t see them."
5. Various of people returning to northern Gaza
STORYLINE:
A displaced Palestinian man returned to northern Gaza on Monday to find his home reduced to ruins, as tens of thousands grapple with an apocalyptic landscape of devastation.
Israel lifted its closure of the north for the first time since the early weeks of the 15-month war with Hamas in accordance with a fragile ceasefire, allowing Palestinians to finally return to the most heavily destroyed part of the Gaza Strip.
Massive crowds of people carrying their belongings on foot stretched along a main highway running next to the coast in a stunning reversal of the mass exodus from the north at the start of the war, which many Palestinians had feared Israel would make permanent.
"It’s a pile of rubble. We didn’t take any money or clothes or anything, we left them all in there, under the rubble. We left the tents behind only to come here to other tents," a Palestinian displaced man told the Associated Press.
Palestinians who have been sheltering in squalid tent camps and schools-turned-shelters for over a year are eager to return to their homes — even knowing that they have likely been damaged or destroyed.
Many saw their return as an act of steadfastness after Israel’s military campaign, which was launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, and as a repudiation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion that large numbers of Palestinians be resettled in Egypt and Jordan.
The opening was delayed for two days over a dispute between Hamas and Israel, which said the militant group had changed the order of the hostages it released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
Mediators resolved the dispute overnight.
The ceasefire is aimed at winding down the deadliest and most destructive war ever fought between Israel and Hamas and securing the release of dozens of hostages captured in the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Israel ordered the wholescale evacuation of the north in the opening days of the war and sealed it off shortly after ground troops moved in.
Around a million people fled to the south in October 2023, while hundreds of thousands remained in the north, which had some of the heaviest fighting and the worst destruction of the war.
AP video by Ossama Saleh
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