Joy and Grief as Returning Gazans Find Communities Smashed to Rubble

The Washington Post / Claire Parker, Hajar Harb, Mohamad El Chamaa, Heba Farouk Mahfouz

16:44 JST, January 20, 2025

JERUSALEM – The skies over Gaza finally went quiet for the first time in 14 months Sunday as a fragile ceasefire took hold.

The whine of Israeli drones – the soundtrack of more than a year of war – receded. Hamas fighters emerged into the daylight, wearing masks and wielding guns atop pickup trucks, to the cheers of civilians. Displaced Gazans marched in the thousands down dusty roads from makeshift shelters to the hometowns they had fled as the Israeli army advanced.

Joy mingled with grief as Gazans began to confront the scale of the loss. Homes reduced to rubble. The bodies of loved ones still buried under the debris. Whole communities flattened. And scars, visible and not, from the war’s human toll: More than 46,900 dead and 110,750 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

Israel launched the campaign after Hamas-led fighters from Gaza carried out a surprise attack against Israeli communities near the enclave on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 250 more as hostages.

The northern city of Jabalya bore the brunt of Israel’s military operations in recent months.

“We congratulate our people on the ceasefire, it would not have been possible without the sacrifices of this blessed people, this good people, this people who remained attached to their land in the northern Gaza Strip,” said Mayor Mazen Najjar, standing before piles of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

The six-week truce, approved by Israel’s government late Friday, followed a deadly false start.

Hamas and Israel had agreed to pause hostilities at 8:30 a.m. local time. But the ceasefire was delayed when Hamas failed to produce the names of the three Israeli hostages it planned to release Sunday. Israel used the delay to continue striking the enclave with bombs, drones and artillery, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 36, a civil defense spokesman said.

Ahmed al-Qudra, 35, ventured out with his 16-year-old son, Adly, and his young daughters after 8:30 a.m. They planned to pick up some food in preparation for the journey back to the ruins of their home northwest of Khan Younis, according to a cousin. At around 10 a.m., an Israeli strike targeted a vehicle nearby, killing the father and son.

Moments before, relatives and friends had gathered in the street to congratulate each other on surviving the war. Qudra and his son “were killed after they had waited a long time to live the moment of feeling safe,” cousin Mohammed al-Qudra said. The sight of Ahmed’s daughters crying over their bodies, he said, was perhaps “the most cruel scene for my heart that I have seen since the beginning of the war.”

Hamas delivered the list of hostages; Israel halted its attacks at 11:15 a.m. It was the first pause in fighting since a week-long ceasefire that began in November 2023, the second month of the war.

Crowds of Gazans began walking from al-Mawasi, the coastal area where more than 1 million people have been sheltering in tents, toward the southern border city of Rafah, videos shared with The Washington Post showed. But the city they’d left when Israel invaded Rafah in May was largely gone.

Videos showed men, women and children, some with backpacks, some with rolled-up blankets or mattresses, walking along a wide, dusty road. They returned to a landscape brutalized by bombs: pancaked apartment blocks, a human skull lying on the dusty ground.

“The city that always embraced hope and life has been transformed into rubble and ruins as a result of the brutal and systematic aggression,” Ahmad Soufi, the mayor of Rafah, told reporters Sunday morning. “Entire neighborhoods were wiped out, the infrastructure destroyed and the city became uninhabitable.”

He said 60 percent of the city’s homes, or about 16,000 buildings, “were razed,” and nearly all of the municipality’s buildings were destroyed. Fifteen of 24 water wells and 70 percent of the sewage network were knocked out of service, he said, nine hospitals were offline and four schools were “completely destroyed.”

The Washington Post could not verify these numbers independently. Israeli authorities have denied foreign journalists access to Gaza since the start of the war.

Civilians joined civil defense workers to retrieve the dead. Saleh al-Hams, head of nursing at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, said the bodies of 45 people killed during the months-long Israeli operation in Rafah had arrived at the hospital’s morgue by early afternoon.

Still, a celebratory mood prevailed. Videos of the return to Rafah showed women ululating, cars honking and young men chanting “God is great.” “The best feeling!” yelled one man, beaming, from the back of a motorized cart.

In northernmost Gaza, where Israel had fought regrouped Hamas cells since October, there was less to celebrate.

Israeli forces cut off nearly all humanitarian aid to civilians for months, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate southward to Gaza City. The bombing and shelling was constant, and the health system almost entirely out of service. Israeli forces demolished entire neighborhoods and erected military fortifications in their place, The Post reported last month, in what a former Israeli defense minister called a campaign of “ethnic cleansing.”

“We have entered North Gaza this morning,” said Ahmed Abu Qamar, 34, a human rights researcher from Jabalya who had been displaced with his family for more than 100 days. “We are talking about a completely burned area. The rubble and destruction covers all the houses. There is hardly a single intact house.”

His home in Jabalya was “completely destroyed,” he said. His sister, his brother-in-law, their two children and 17 of his cousins were dead.

“There are no signs of life in North Gaza,” he said.

Still, Abu Qamar said, he and many others who returned Sunday were determined to live in tents amid the wreckage while they rebuilt.

“The most important thing is that we survived the war of extermination,” he said. “We witnessed many atrocities over 470 days.”

Considerable uncertainty remains about whether this first 42-day phase of the ceasefire will hold, and whether Israel will return to fighting when it’s done. As part of the deal, Israeli forces withdrew from population centers in Gaza. But they’re allowed to keep tanks and troops along a buffer zone around the strip’s land borders for the duration of the ceasefire.

Mediators – Egypt, Qatar and the outgoing Biden administration – are wagering that the pause in hostilities in the first phase will make it more difficult for Israel to resume the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing intense pressure on the right to do just that.

Still, Gazans took the first steps Sunday toward repairing and rebuilding their communities. In Rafah and Jabalya, bulldozers began to clear roads, while local authorities pleaded for international funding and additional heavy equipment to restore critical infrastructure.

Gaza’s civil police, which is under Hamas but separate from its military, deployed across the enclave to direct traffic and guard aid convoys without fear of being targeted by Israel. Their presence eased the distribution of food and other aid, according to Adham Shuhaibar, owner of a Palestinian transportation company. Distribution had been crippled in recent months by looting attacks on convoys by armed criminals in southern Gaza.

Providing sufficient shelter, food and essential supplies to an exhausted, malnourished and sickly population will be a daunting task, aid workers said. Under the ceasefire deal, 600 trucks – 550 carrying aid and 50 carrying fuel – are to enter Gaza daily, a significant increase from recent months. A Post reporter saw hundreds of trucks on the Egyptian side of the border in a line that stretched more than a mile Sunday.

The Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing has been shut since May, when Israeli forces seized the area and the border terminal infrastructure was destroyed. The crossing is supposed to reopen under the deal, but negotiators have yet to agree who will run it.

In recent months, aid from Egypt has traveled a circuitous route to the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel. With the ceasefire underway, trucks began rolling into the enclave at a rapid clip.

Ibrahim Mohamed Ibrahim, 32, an Egyptian truck driver who has delivered aid to Gaza since the start of the war, said he and others had dropped off hundreds of trucks’ worth of assistance by the late afternoon. Israeli inspection processes that had slowed aid deliveries were sped up, he said.

“Everyone is cooperating with us very nicely to get supplies and fuel moving,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza section of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, wrote in a WhatsApp message Sunday afternoon.

Ambulances were stationed at the Egyptian border to receive wounded Palestinians for medical treatment. But it’s unclear when such evacuations, planned for the ceasefire’s first phase, will begin. More than 12,000 patients await specialized care outside of Gaza, according to the World Health Organization.