Afrasianet - Along al-Rashid Street in northern Gaza, masses of Palestinians walk barefoot and on rickety vehicles, carrying what is left of their belongings and children, returning to homes that no longer stand, and to neighborhoods wiped off the map by the war.
Thousands of men, women and children poured in from south to north after the ceasefire was announced, in a human scene of tears mixed with surprise, nostalgia with fear, and hope with pain.
Holding the hand of her daughter, who was hit in the head in Israeli shelling, Nabila Basal says: "The feeling is indescribable, thank God... hopefully it will be our last suffering. They are happy that they have saved the war and stopped the suffering."
When Ahmed al-Jabari arrived at his home in Gaza, he found ruins instead of the walls he had built forty years earlier, and he said in a moment of loss, "My house was destroyed in an instant. No blood today, but where do we go? Will we live twenty years in a tent?"
As the human convoys approached the heart of Gaza, the city they knew seemed to be no longer what it was.
Noha Daoud, a mother of five from the Shujaiya neighborhood, returned on foot from Deir al-Balah to find her house rubble: "We can't distinguish our houses, the streets are resting, everything has been wiped out. It is as if the city has gone through some disaster by abandoning stone at stone."
She wipes her tears as she points to the rubble: "I don't know where I am, there is no house, no place, no water and no electricity... We live on nothing."
In the al-Tuffah neighborhood, Ahmed Maqat, a young man who lost family members, stood in front of the rubble of his house. "The area has been completely wiped out, no houses and no streets, but mountains of rubble."
As Abu Anas Sukkar tried to remove stones from the front of his seven-story house, he said in a hoarse voice: "We were walking around a house that shelters 47 of our family, but we found a pile of stones. We want to live on top of the rubble, there are no tents or shelters."
According to the government information office in Gaza, more than 90 percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, and losses have exceeded $70 billion.
Some 300,000 housing units have been razed to the ground, displacing nearly two million people, many of whom are now living in tents with no water, electricity or safety.
They refuse to surrender
Despite the harshness of the scene, Gazans refuse to give up.
Ruba Shehab, a youth activist who came with a volunteer team to distribute water and food, says: "People are coming back to memory, not to homes. But this return itself is a new life. After two years of hell, the return is hope, even if it is on the ashes."
Dr. Khaled Al-Araj from Al-Shifa Medical Complex said: "The truce is political, but the humanitarian reality has not changed. We treat patients under tents, there is no ready hospitals and no electricity."
"Coming back, after all, is the beginning of my own healing. People want to see their homes, even if they have become dust."
As the sun set, a heavy calm reigned over the war-weary city.
A calm that resembles the silence that precedes crying, but it also resembles the breath of a city trying to come back to life, even if only from the rubble.
In Gaza, wars don't end... Rather, her faces change. Under a sky heavy with smoke and dust, Palestinian families are moving north at a reluctant pace, rediscovering their city, which is no longer the same as it used to be. Mothers carrying children exhausted by displacement, and elderly people pulling small carts loaded with memories of their homes that have become dust.
The faces are pale, the eyes are overwhelmed with indescribable confusion, but among the rubble there are glances that insist on life.
Gazans are returning to their destroyed homes, not in search of shelter, but in search of meaning... About an identity that war could not erase, and about a homeland that still rises from the ashes every time.