KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: Even before the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was fully in place Sunday, Palestinians in the war-battered Gaza Strip began to return to the remains of the homes they had evacuated during the 15-month war.
Majida Abu Jarad made quick work of packing the contents of her family’s tent in the sprawling tent city of Muwasi, just north of the strip’s southern border with Egypt.
At the start of the war, they were forced to flee their house in Gaza’s northern town of Beit Hanoun, where they used to gather around the kitchen table or on the roof on summer evenings amid the scent of roses and jasmine.
The house from those fond memories is gone, and for the past year, Abu Jarad, her husband and their six daughters have trekked the length of the Gaza Strip, following one evacuation order after another by the Israeli military.
Seven times they fled, she said, and each time, their lives became more unrecognizable to them as they crowded with strangers to sleep in a school classroom, searching for water in a vast tent camp or sleeping on the street.
Now the family is preparing to begin the trek home — or to whatever remains of it — and to reunite with relatives who remained in the north.
“As soon as they said that the truce would start on Sunday, we started packing our bags and deciding what we would take, not caring that we would still be living in tents,” Abu Jarad said.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 people. Some 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were combatants. Over 110,000 Palestinians have been wounded, it said. The Israeli military says it has killed over 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
The Israeli military’s bombardment has flattened large swaths of Gaza and displaced 1.9 million of its 2.3 million residents.
Even before the ceasefire officially took effect — and as tank shelling continued overnight and into the morning — many Palestinians began trekking through the wreckage to reach their homes, some on foot and others hauling their belongings on donkey carts.
“They’re returning to retrieve their loved ones under the rubble,” said Mohamed Mahdi, a displaced Palestinian and father of two. He was forced to leave his three-story home in Gaza City’s southeastern Zaytoun neighborhood a few months ago,
Mahdi managed to reach his home Sunday morning, walking amid the rubble from western Gaza. On the road he said he saw the Hamas-run police force being deployed to the streets in Gaza City, helping people returning to their homes.
Despite the vast scale of the destruction and uncertain prospects for rebuilding, “people were celebrating,” he said. “They are happy. They started clearing the streets and removing the rubble of their homes. It’s a moment they’ve waited for 15 months.”
Um Saber, a 48-year-old widow and mother of six children, returned to her hometown of Beit Lahiya. She asked to be identified only by her honorific, meaning “mother of Saber,” out of safety concerns.
Speaking by phone, she said her family had found bodies in the street as they trekked home, some of whom appeared to have been lying in the open for weeks.
When they reached Beit Lahiya, they found their home and much of the surrounding area reduced to rubble, she said. Some families immediately began digging through the debris in search of missing loved ones. Others began trying to clear areas where they could set up tents.
Um Saber said she also found the area’s Kamal Adwan hospital “completely destroyed.”
“It’s no longer a hospital at all,” she said. “They destroyed everything.”
The hospital has been hit multiple times over the past three months by Israeli forces waging an offensive in largely isolated northern Gaza against Hamas fighters it says have regrouped.
The military has claimed that Hamas militants operate inside Kamal Adwan, which hospital officials have denied.
In Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, residents returned to find massive destruction across the city that was once a hub for displaced families fleeing Israel’s bombardment elsewhere in the Palestinian enclave. Some found human remains amid the rubble of houses and the streets.
“It’s an indescribable scene. It’s like you see a Hollywood horror movie,” said Mohamed Abu Taha, a Rafah resident, speaking to The Associated Press as he and his brother were inspecting his family home in the city’s Salam neighborhood. “Flattened houses, human remains, skulls and other body parts, in the street and in the rubble.”
He shared footage of piles of rubble he said had been his family’s house. “I want to know how they destroyed our home.”
The returns come amid looming uncertainty regarding whether the ceasefire deal will bring more than a temporary halt to the fighting, who will govern the enclave and how it will be rebuilt.
Not all families will be able to return home immediately. Under the terms of the deal, returning displaced people will only be able to cross the Netzarim corridor from south to north beginning seven days into the ceasefire.
And those who do return may face a long wait to rebuild their houses.
The United Nations has said that reconstruction could take more than 350 years if Gaza remains under an Israeli blockade. Using satellite data, the United Nations estimated last month that 69 percent of the structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including over 245,000 homes. With over 100 trucks working full-time, it would take more than 15 years just to clear the rubble away,
But for many families, the immediate relief overrode fears about the future.
“We will remain in a tent, but the difference is that the bleeding will stop, the fear will stop, and we will sleep reassured,” Abu Jarad said.
Palestinians trek across rubble to return to their homes as Gaza ceasefire takes hold
https://arab.news/cktrd
Palestinians trek across rubble to return to their homes as Gaza ceasefire takes hold
- Many Palestinian found their homes reduced to rubble
Iraq’s political future in limbo as factions vie for power
- The government that eventually emerges will be inheriting a security situation that has stabilized in recent years
BAGHDAD: Political factions in Iraq have been maneuvering since the parliamentary election more than a month ago to form alliances that will shape the next government.
The November election didn’t produce a bloc with a decisive majority, opening the door to a prolonged period of negotiations.
The government that eventually emerges will be inheriting a security situation that has stabilized in recent years, but it will also face a fragmented parliament, growing political influence by armed factions, a fragile economy, and often conflicting international and regional pressures, including the future of Iran-backed armed groups.
Uncertain prospects
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani’s party took the largest number of seats in the election. Al-Sudani positioned himself in his first term as a pragmatist focused on improving public services and managed to keep Iraq on the sidelines of regional conflicts.
While his party is nominally part of the Coordination Framework, a coalition of Iran-backed Shiite parties that became the largest parliamentary bloc, observers say it’s unlikely that the Coordination Framework will support Al-Sudani’s reelection bid.
“The choice for prime minister has to be someone the Framework believes they can control and doesn’t have his own political ambitions,” said Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi political analyst and fellow at The Century Foundation think tank.
Al-Sudani came to power in 2022 with the backing of the Framework, but Jiyad said that he believes now the coalition “will not give Al-Sudani a second term as he has become a powerful competitor.”
The only Iraqi prime minister to serve a second term since 2003 was Nouri Al-Maliki, first elected in 2006. His bid for a third term failed after being criticized for monopolizing power and alienating Sunnis and Kurds.
Jiyad said that the Coordination Framework drew a lesson from Al-Maliki “that an ambitious prime minister will seek to consolidate power at the expense of others.”
He said that the figure selected as Iraq’s prime minister must generally be seen as acceptable to Iran and the United States — two countries with huge influence over Iraq — and to Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.
Al-Sudani in a bind
In the election, Shiite alliances and lists — dominated by the Coordination Framework parties — secured 187 seats, Sunni groups 77 seats, Kurdish groups 56 seats, in addition to nine seats reserved for members of minority groups.
The Reconstruction and Development Coalition, led by Al-Sudani, dominated in Baghdad, and in several other provinces, winning 46 seats.
Al-Sudani’s results, while strong, don’t allow him to form a government without the support of a coalition, forcing him to align the Coordination Framework to preserve his political prospects.
Some saw this dynamic at play earlier this month when Al-Sudani’s government retracted a terror designation that Iraq had imposed on the Lebanese Hezbollah militant group and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — Iran-aligned groups that are allied with Iraqi armed factions — just weeks after imposing the measure, saying it was a mistake.
The Coalition Framework saw its hand strengthened by the absence from the election of the powerful Sadrist movement led by Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, which has been boycotting the political system since being unable to form a government after winning the most seats in the 2021 election.
Hamed Al-Sayed, a political activist and official with the National Line Movement, an independent party that boycotted the election, said that Sadr’s absence had a “central impact.”
“It reduced participation in areas that were traditionally within his sphere of influence, such as Baghdad and the southern governorates, leaving an electoral vacuum that was exploited by rival militia groups,” he said, referring to several parties within the Coordination Framework that also have armed wings.
Groups with affiliated armed wings won more than 100 parliamentary seats, the largest showing since 2003.
Other political actors
Sunni forces, meanwhile, sought to reorganize under a new coalition called the National Political Council, aiming to regain influence lost since the 2018 and 2021 elections.
The Kurdish political scene remained dominated by the traditional split between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan parties, with ongoing negotiations between the two over the presidency.
By convention, Iraq’s president is always a Kurd, while the more powerful prime minister is Shiite and the parliamentary speaker Sunni.
Parliament is required to elect a speaker within 15 days of the Federal Supreme Court’s ratification of the election result, which occurred on Dec. 14.
The parliament should elect a president within 30 days of its first session, and the prime minister should be appointed within 15 days of the president’s election, with 30 days allotted to form the new government.
Washington steps in
The incoming government will face major economic and political challenges.
They include a high level of public debt — more than 90 trillion Iraqi dinars ($69 billion) — and a state budget that remains reliant on oil for about 90 percent of revenues, despite attempts to diversify, as well as entrenched corruption.
But perhaps the most delicate question will be the future of the Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition of militias that formed to fight the Daesh group as it rampaged across Iraq more than a decade ago.
It was formally placed under the control of the Iraqi military in 2016 but in practice still operates with significant autonomy. After the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 sparked the devastating war in Gaza, some armed groups within the PMF launched attacks on US bases in the region in retaliation for Washington’s backing of Israel.
The US has been pushing for Iraq to disarm Iran-backed groups — a difficult proposition, given the political power that many of them hold and Iran’s likely opposition to such a step.
Two senior Iraqi political officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly, said that the United States had warned against selecting any candidate for prime minister who controls an armed faction and also cautioned against letting figures associated with militias control key ministries or hold significant security posts.
“The biggest issue will be how to deal with the pro-Iran parties with armed wings, particularly those... which have been designated by the United States as terrorist entities,” Jiyad said.
