‘It’s like a nuclear bomb has hit’: shocked Palestinians return home to desolation. Families are going back to Gaza City and surrounds to find their neighbourhoods obliterated, with many forced to camp in the ruins.- By Seham Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger in The Guardian

‘All our memories were gone’: shattered buildings in Gaza City after the Israeli offensive.

Photograph: AP

When the Gaza ceasefire took effect a week ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians began to move from the sprawling camps in the south back to their homes in Gaza City and the surrounding area.

For most, it was a shocking and bitter homecoming.

A month after they had been ordered out by Israeli forces, Palestinians filled the coastal road north. It soon became a solid river of people, mostly trudging on foot, carrying the few possessions they had salvaged from one displacement after another.

What the returnees found on arrival was complete desolation. Large swaths of the north had simply been flattened. Their homes and neighbourhoods were no longer recognisable. Their communities had been erased.

The sheer scale of demolition left families with an awful dilemma: stay and seek shelter in the shattered stumps of their former homes, or return to the tented camps in the south where they had a better chance of finding food and water. And looming over that decision was the great unknown of how long the truce would last, and whether it would ever take hold as a lasting peace.

“I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground,” Suhair al-Absi, a 50-year-old mother of seven, said on reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City. “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”

The family had clung to their home until the last minute as the Israeli army pressed forward through Gaza City in September, supposedly to crush any vestiges of Hamas. “We left when the tanks reached the entrance to our neighborhood. We could see them from the window,” Absi said.

It was not only tanks. The family saw one house after another being blown up by “robots” – repurposed armoured vehicles steered by remote control and packed with explosives, which the Israel Defense Forces have been using to minimise their casualties... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/its-like-a-nuclear-bomb-has-hit-shocked-palestinians-return-home-to-desolation?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD QUOTES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]