Thousands of people continued to travel by foot toward Gaza City on Saturday as a cease-fire held overnight, but early accounts described devastation across the area.
“The scale of destruction is really staggering,” said Olga Cherevko, a spokeswoman for the United Nations’ humanitarian office, who visited the city this past week. “We have a lot of people moving north to Gaza City and arriving to find the ruins where their homes used to be, so there is a lot of conflicted emotion.”
Mediators hope the cease-fire, which began at noon Friday, will lead to the end of two years of war.
In Gaza, joy at the pause in fighting has been tempered by the scale of destruction that many face as they return to the north. Hundreds of thousands of people fled Gaza City last month as Israel began a ground offensive there.
Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency rescue service, said on Saturday that 63 bodies had been recovered in the streets of Gaza City since the cease-fire began. He said he believed dozens more were probably under the rubble.
The director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, said the health care system would face “severe shortages” and “immense” challenges as people returned to the city. “We’ve finished one war and entered another,” he said.
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The post Thousands Return to Northern Gaza, Hopeful but Faced With Devastation appeared first on New York Times.
