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January 28, 2025 | 01:28 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - More than 300,000 Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza following a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza Media Office said on Monday.
"More than 300,000 people who fled from the southern and central Gaza governorate returned to Gaza and the northern Gaza governorate today through the Rashid (western) and Salah al-Din (eastern) roads, after 470 days," the office said in a statement as reported by Anadolu.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians began returning to northern Gaza on Monday under a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement between the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and Israel.
They returned to the northern areas and their destroyed homes in high spirits.
"By returning, we won," Rania Miqdad, who returned to Gaza City with her family, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency as quoted by Al Jazeera.
Returning with his wife and four children to the ruins of their home, Ismail Abu Mattar said, “The tents here are better than the tents there,” referring to the sprawling, squalid refugee camps to the south where Palestinians have been ordered to move by Israeli forces.
“We thought we would not return, like our ancestors,” Abu Mattar told the AP, explaining that his grandparents were among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from the occupied West Bank by Israel during the violence that led to Israel’s creation in 1948.
The displacement is remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
An elderly Palestinian woman pushed in a wheelchair sang a traditional Palestinian song from 1948 as she made her way north.
“Stand by each other, Palestinians, support each other. Palestine is gone, but it hasn’t said its last goodbye,” she sang with a smile.
Ibrahim Hammad, his wife and five children walked for five hours to their neighborhood in Gaza City — where their home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
“We have to go back, even to the ruins,” she said. “We have no home, but our families are here, and we will help each other.”
The Gaza ceasefire agreement, which came into effect on January 19, 2025, halted Israel’s genocide that has killed more than 47,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured more than 111,400 people since October 7, 2023.
Israel’s crimes in its genocidal war have also left more than 11,000 people missing, widespread destruction and a severe humanitarian crisis that has claimed the lives of many elderly people and children.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in November last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its war in the region.
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