With children and pets in arms and their belongings loaded onto donkey carts or onto the roofs of cars, thousands of displaced Palestinians from Gaza returned home amid a four-day truce between Israel and Hamas started.
The din of war was replaced Friday by the horns of traffic jams and the sirens of ambulances cutting through the crowds streaming out of hospitals and schools where they had taken refuge.
For almost seven weeks, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have been incessant.
Some 1.7 million of the territory’s 2.4 million residents are estimated to have been displaced and more than half of the homes damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.
But on Friday morning, no shots were heard in Khan Younis, in the south of the Palestinian territory.
Crowds of men, women and children moved on foot, in carts or in tuk-tuks with the few belongings they had taken with them at the start of the war.
Large parts of Gaza have been razed by thousands of air raids and the territory faces shortages of food, water and fuel.
Israeli military planes dropped leaflets warning southerners not to return to the north, where they had previously asked Palestinians to leave for their safety.
“The war is not over yet,” they read. “Returning to the north is prohibited and very dangerous!!! »