It is about to pass, the end is so close that they feel the keys they have kept all these months go into the locks of their old houses, the door hinges are turned in their hands, the beds they will sink into to rest in peace for their first night. more than 15 months – their own beds. Only a few days left to go.
Two nights before the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza was announced, Layan al-Mohtaseb, 15, dreamed of returning to his room in Gaza City, cleaning it as he used to do before his family fled during the war.
“This time, it feels like we’re really going home,” she said.
That may only be true for those whose homes are still standing after months of destruction. And there is always the possibility that war could resume after the initial six-week truce if talks on one break down. But all over Gaza, people were dreaming of the first minutes of peace, the people they would hug as soon as the agreement was reached, the graves they would visit. They could already see that they were going to cry, tears that they didn’t know if they would be happy or sad.
If Wednesday night was to celebrate the news of the ceasefire, the following days would be preparations. As Israel’s security cabinet met to vote on a cease-fire agreement and the release of hostages on Friday, Palestinians were calling for rental trucks to bring their belongings back to northern Gaza, or vans, or even donkey carts; they were gathering tents wondering where they would live if their homes were gone.
Fedaa al-Rayyes, 40, was already buying ingredients to make small sweets to welcome the end of the war. But the first thing he planned to do when the bombs and drones were silent was to look for relatives he hadn’t seen for months, to find out who was still alive and mourn those who didn’t live that day.
“It is impossible to describe this mixture of relief and grief,” he said. “I am happy that we survived and I thank the kind people who helped us. However, I am very sad – I am sad for the relatives and friends we have lost and for the neighbors we will return to without them. “
There were practical issues to think about, too. He would remind his children to “stay away from anything that could be dangerous or explode,” he said — of all the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza that could continue to add to the war’s death toll, one accidental explosion at a time, months or so. years to come.
Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million have been forced to hunker down in tents and schools and other people’s homes for most of the war, driven by Israeli airstrikes and orders to leave their homes or previously tried shelters. Now they could think of something other than returning home. Even if those homes were destroyed. Even if now they were nothing more than rubble and ashes.
Manal Silmi, 34, a psychologist for an international aid group, first planned to hug her mother and siblings and “cry, letting out all the pain we’ve been carrying these 15 months,” she said.
Then the journey home could begin. According to the agreement, people who have moved from northern Gaza to the south will be allowed to return on the seventh day after it starts working on Sunday. His family was already looking for a large van to transport all their tents and blankets back north. His friends and the few relatives he had left behind in Gaza City had called, making plans to meet them at the crossing that separates northern and southern Gaza.
“We will hug, we will cry and we will thank God again and again for surviving this war,” he said.
Al-Hassan al-Harazeen, 23, a college student studying computer science, knew his family’s house in eastern Gaza City was in ruins, he said. But he was still going to go straight there as soon as the ceasefire started.
He imagined himself spraying his family’s name on any brick that was in one block, picturing himself sitting on top of the rubble for a while, he said, “hugging those broken stones and bricks as if they were part of me. “
After that he would visit the grave where his grandfather was buried at the beginning of the war to read him the opening verses of the Quran.
Even after negotiators announced the deal on Wednesday, Israel was still shelling Gaza heavily. Two of Jamal Mortaja’s employees in the solar business he had before the war were killed the day before. They will be in his thoughts, said Mr. Mortaja, 65, when he returned to Gaza City to visit the rest of his house before checking his shops in al-Ansar roundabout.
Raed al-Gharabli, too, wanted to return to Gaza City, despite the destruction of his home, just to say goodbye before the rubble was cleared. He wanted to go to his village, Shuja’iyya, to greet the neighbors who had been closing all these long months. He took his temporary tent from the Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, where he had fled with his family, and set it up next to the ruins of his house.
“I can’t wait to see this moment become a reality,” said Mr al-Gharabli, 48, a tailor. “If I could, I would fly north and sit on the rubble of my house.”
In order to speed things up, he said his family will leave some belongings to neighbors in Deir al Balah, where they and other displaced people have become dependent and dependent on people they did not know at all at the beginning of the war.
There was even a part of them that was already upset about it, the relationship that existed between them and their temporary neighbors.
After his home in the southern town of Khan Younis was destroyed, Ismail al-Sheikh, 39, a university lecturer, moved to a nearby tent, where he met two men in nearby tents. The new friends spend their evening reminiscing about life before Oct. 7, 2023, when the war begins, and they wonder out loud what will happen when the nightmare is over. What would they do? Where they were going.
For Mr. al-Sheikh, who taught at al-Aqsa University, the daydreams were crazy. He just wanted his normal life, teaching his classes, meeting friends at night at the Titanic Restaurant in Khan Younis. The Titanic, they had heard was wrecked.
Now, with the war drawing to a close, his new friends were preparing to return to Gaza City, where they came from.
“I will miss those gatherings very much,” said Mr al-Sheikh. “It’s really a mix of emotions – happiness at their return, sadness at saying goodbye and hope for what’s to come.”
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