Palestinians return to ruins and US troops land in Israel amid plea over aid

Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have loaded cars, carts and bicycles with belongings and made their way back to their neighbourhoods, weaving through streets shrouded in dust as bulldozers began to claw through the wreckage of two years of bombardment.

Aid groups urged Israel to reopen more crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, and about 200 US troops arrived in Israel to help retrieve hostages and monitor the ceasefire with Hamas.

The US troops will set up a centre to facilitate the flow of aid as well as logistical and security assistance.

The head of the US military’s Central Command said he visited Gaza on Saturday to prepare it.

“This great effort will be achieved with no US boots on the ground in Gaza,” Admiral Brad Cooper said in a statement, noting that his command would lead the centre.

Aid is just one issue for Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes.

“When people get there, they’re going to find rubble. They’ll find that their homes and their neighbourhoods have been reduced to dust,” Unicef spokesperson Tess Ingram told The Associated Press (AP) from central Gaza.

“A ceasefire alone is not enough,” Ms Ingram added, and called for a “surge of humanitarian aid that begins to address the tremendous damage that has been done over the past two years”.

The World Food Programme said on Saturday it was ready to restore 145 food distribution points across the famine-stricken Gaza Strip, once Israel allows for expanded deliveries.

Before Israel sealed off Gaza in March, UN agencies provided food at 400 distribution points.

A UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet public, said Israel has approved expanded aid deliveries, starting on Sunday.

Though the timeline and how the food will enter Gaza remain unclear, the distribution points will allow Palestinians to access food at more locations than they could through the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which had operated four locations since taking over distribution in late May.

COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of humanitarian aid, said that more than 500 trucks entered Gaza on Friday, although many crossings remain closed.

The aid is among the 170,000 metric tons that have been positioned in neighbouring countries awaiting permission from Israel to restart deliveries that have been suspended.

Israel’s military has said that under the truce deal, the 48 hostages still in Gaza would be freed on Monday.

These are key steps towards ending the war ignited by Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel.

The fighting has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, flattened entire neighbourhoods, and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s more than two million people, some multiple times.

Across the border, Israel braced for the long-awaited return of hostages kept captive for more than two years.

“It’s been a few nights that we can’t sleep. We want them back and we feel that everything is just hanging on a thread,” Maayan Eliasi, a resident of Tel Aviv, said at a gathering at the city’s Hostage Square.

“I can’t heal. None of us can.”

The government believes around 20 of the 48 hostages thought to be in Gaza remain alive.

Questions remain over who will govern Gaza as Israeli troops gradually pull back and whether Hamas will disarm, as called for in the agreement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unilaterally ended a truce in March, has suggested Israel could resume its offensive if Hamas fails to disarm.

“If it’s achieved the easy way – so be it. If not – it will be achieved the hard way,” he said on Friday, pledging that the next stage would bring Hamas’s disarmament.

The scale of destruction is likely to become clearer as Israel’s military withdraws to ceasefire lines, but more than three out of every four buildings have been destroyed, the UN said in September, creating a volume of debris equivalent to 25 Eiffel Towers, much of it probably toxic.

A February assessment by the European Union and World Bank estimated 49 billion dollars in damage, including 16 billion dollars to housing and 6.3 billion dollars to the health sector.

The death toll is expected to rise as more bodies that could not be retrieved during Israel’s offensive are found.

A manager at northern Gaza’s Shifa Hospital told AP that 45 bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza City had arrived over the past 24 hours.

The manager said the bodies had been missing for several days to two weeks.

New security arrangements are taking shape on the ground.

US President Donald Trump’s initial 20-point plan calls for Israel to maintain an open-ended military presence inside Gaza, along its border with Israel.

An international force, comprised largely of troops from Arab and Muslim countries, would be responsible for security inside Gaza, though the timeline is unclear.

The Israeli military has said it will continue to operate defensively from the roughly 50% of Gaza it still controls after pulling back to agreed-upon lines.

US envoy Steve Witkoff told Israeli officials on Friday that the US would establish a centre in Israel to co-ordinate issues concerning Gaza until there is a permanent government, according to a readout of the meeting by a person who attended it and obtained by AP.

Another official confirmed the contents of the readout.

The readout said no US soldiers will be on the ground in Gaza, but there will be people who report to the US and aircraft might operate over the strip for monitoring.

A different official said that a group – including the US, Qatar, Egypt and other countries and organisations – would be part of a mission to locate and identify hostage bodies and avoid previous issues with body misidentification.

It was unclear if the 200 US troops coming to Israel would be part of that group or a separate initiative.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on October 7 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.

In Israel’s ensuing offensive, more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and nearly 170,000 wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says around half the deaths were women and children.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government, and the United Nations and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.

The war has also triggered other conflicts in the region, sparked worldwide protests and led to allegations of genocide that Israel denies.