‘We don’t know what we will see except the wounds’published at 07:21 Greenwich Mean Time
Alice Cuddy
Reporting from Jerusalem
Image source, ReutersDrone footage taken on 19 January of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip
We’ve
been speaking to displaced Gazans this weekend, asking them what they expected to
find when they returned north.
“I
want to go to my house and my land that I got raised in. My joy is being in my
house – whether it’s standing or demolished,” said 42-year-old Nirmeen Musabeh,
who has been displaced since 11 October 2023.
“We
don’t know what we will see except the wounds, but we need to go there. We need
to go back.”
Diab,
a man displaced from Jabalia, said he was hoping to search for his sons and
others who stayed behind.
“If
anyone got killed or is still under the rubble, we want to take them out,” he
said.
“We
want to go back to see what is left of the infrastructure and whether we can
survive there or not.
“People are saying that with the level of destruction,
there are no landmarks remaining. I want to see this with my own eyes.”
Another
man told us he expected to find mass destruction – but still wanted to “kiss the dirt
of the north”.