On Sunday thousands of Palestinians, including men, women, children and elderly, attempted to return to their homes in northern Gaza on when they came under Israeli fire.
Video surfaced on social media showed the once-perilous coastal road of Al Rasheed filled with families walking with their belongings, some riding bicycles, donkey carts and pick-up trucks, smiling and snapping photographs.
‘I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement, we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God’, Majd El-Aqqad said.
Videos started circulating online Sunday morning showing people heading to the north for the first time in such large numbers. Some people told they heard the Israeli military was allowing women and children to move back up. Others said their relatives were allowed to cross over.
The IDF said the reports were false. ‘The northern Gaza Strip continues to be an active war zone and return to the area is not currently permitted’, IDF said.
An elderly woman named Um Mohammad walks along the road carrying a heavy bag on her head and two others in her arms, attempting to reach her home.
She cries and prays for God to protect them. ‘I don’t know anything about my house. It’s our home and our land,” she said.
‘We are tired here. We have been displaced for 191 days’, Malak Abu Nada, a woman from Jabalya, said. Many of the people who attempted to head north had been displaced to Rafah, where Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been threatening to launch an offensive.
