Gaza Strip residents told of devastation as they began returning to their homes on Sunday.
“My house was razed to the ground – the house that I built myself over many years,” Yasser Abu Younis told dpa. He and his family have returned to their home in Rafah in the south after seeking shelter in Al Mawasi on the Mediterranean coast.
“I’m shocked by what I saw in Rafah,” the 40-year-old father of four said. He described total destruction. Bodies, some of them decaying or half-eaten by dogs, were lying in the open, he said.
Yihia Abu Zakaria, a father of three, has yet to return from where he is in the south to his home in Beit Hanoun in the far north of the Gaza Strip. “It’s been 15 months of hell, death and hunger,” he said.
Abu Zakaria plans to move north as soon as this is permitted.
According to the terms of the ceasefire agreement, unarmed people are permitted to move north along a designated route from the seventh day. Cars can travel after being checked. The north is also devastated by repeated fighting.
Eyewitnesses reported that people were returning from areas in the south to Rafah, which lies in the south directly on the border with Egypt. They were walking past huge heaps of rubble.
And in the north, residents who had sought shelter in Gaza City were also moving to their homes further north.
