It’s almost over, they can practically feel the key they’ve been keeping for months slipping into the old house lock, the doorknob turning in their hands, and sinking into bed for their first night’s quiet rest. The end is near enough that you can – over 15 months – in your own bed. Only a few days left.
Two nights before the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza was announced, 15-year-old Rayan al-Moftaseb returned to his bedroom in Gaza City to clean it as he did before his family was evacuated during the war. I was dreaming about it.
“This time it really feels like coming home,” she said.
That may only apply to those whose homes are still standing after months of destruction. And if negotiations over a permanent ceasefire break down, there is always the possibility that fighting could resume after an initial ceasefire of six weeks. But people across Gaza were dreaming of the first moments of peace, of people hugging each other and visiting graves as soon as a ceasefire was signed. They already knew that they shed tears, but they could hardly tell whether the tears came from joy or sadness.
If Wednesday night is a day to celebrate the news of a ceasefire agreement, the next day is a day to prepare. As Israel’s Security Cabinet convened on Friday to vote on a cease-fire and hostage release deal, Palestinians were looking for trucks, vans and even donkey carts to rent to transport cargo back to northern Gaza. They folded up their tents and wondered where they would live if they lost their home.
Fedah Al Rayyes, 40, had already bought the ingredients to make small celebratory sweets to welcome the end of the war. But when the sounds of bombs and drones died down, the first thing she thought to do was look for relatives she hadn’t seen in months, see who was still alive, and make the most of this day. It was to mourn those who could not be seen.
“It’s impossible to explain this feeling of relief and sadness,” she says. “I’m glad to have survived and I’m grateful to the kind people who helped me. But I’m also very sad, thinking about the relatives and friends we lost and the neighborhood we’ll be returning to without them. i am sad.”
There were some things I had to think about realistically. She tells her children to “stay away from anything that is still dangerous or potentially explosive,” she said. Unexploded ordnance litters the Gaza Strip, one explosion at a time and could continue to add to the war’s casualty toll for months. year To come.
Most of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people had to huddle in tents, schools and other people’s apartments for much of the war due to Israeli airstrikes and orders to evacuate their homes and initial shelters. Now I can hardly think about anything other than going home. Even if those homes were damaged. Even if it’s nothing but rubble and ash.
Manal Shilmi, 34, a psychologist with an international aid organization, said her first intention was to hug her mother and siblings and “cry out all the pain I’ve been carrying for the past 15 months.”
Then the journey home may begin. According to the agreement, people evacuated from northern Gaza to the south will be allowed to return on the seventh day after the ceasefire takes effect on Sunday. Her family was already looking for a large van to transport all their tents and bedding north. Her friend and the few relatives she left behind in Gaza City had already called and planned to meet at the intersection that separates northern and southern Gaza.
“We hug each other, cry and thank God over and over again for surviving this war,” she said.
Al Hassan Al Harazeen, 23, a fourth-year computer science student, said he knew his family’s home in eastern Gaza City was in ruins. But he will go straight there as soon as the ceasefire begins.
He spray-painted his family’s names on the still-integrated bricks and imagined himself sitting on the rubble for a while, he said. ”
He then visited the grave where he had buried his grandfather when the war began and recited the opening verses of the Koran for him.
Even as the arbitrators announced the agreement on Wednesday, Israel was still heavily bombing Gaza. Two employees of Jamal Mortaya’s pre-war solar panel business were killed the day before. Mortaja, 65, said he would think of them when he returned to Gaza City to visit the remains of his home, before checking out his shop at the Al-Ansar roundabout. Ta.
Raed al-Gharabri also wanted to return to Gaza City, even though his home was destroyed, just to say goodbye before the rubble was cleared. He wanted to walk through his neighborhood, Shujaiyah, greeting his neighbors who had been working hard for months. He took a makeshift tent from Deir al-Bala in central Gaza, where he had fled with his family, and set it up next to the ruins of his home.
“I can’t wait for this moment to become reality,” said Al Gharabri, 48, a seamstress. “If I could, I would fly straight north and land on the rubble of the house.”
To speed things up, the family plans to leave some belongings with their neighbors in Deir al-Balah, he said. There, they and other refugees had come to trust and rely on people who were complete strangers to them at the beginning of the war.
Some of them were already nostalgic for the friendships they had developed with their temporary neighbors.
After his home in the southern city of Khan Younis was destroyed, university lecturer Ismail al-Sheikh, 39, moved to a nearby tent, where he met two men in a nearby tent. The new friends spent the night remembering their lives before the war began on October 7, 2023, and imagining aloud what it would be like when the nightmare ended. What would they do? where will they go?
For Al-Sheikh, who taught at Al-Aqsa University, the fantasy was not at all strange. He just wanted to get back to a normal life, teaching classes and meeting friends at the Titanic Restaurant in Khan Younis in the evenings. I heard that the Titanic had collapsed into rubble.
Now that the war is coming to an end, his new friends are preparing to return to their hometown of Gaza City.
“I will really miss those kinds of gatherings,” Al-Sheikh said. “I feel a mixture of emotions: joy at their return, sadness at their departure, and hope for the future.”
