Khamis and Ahmad Imarah knew they wouldn’t find much more than rubble when returning to their home in northern Gaza. But they had to go. Their father and brother are still buried under the debris, more than a year after their home was struck by Israeli forces.

“I don’t want anything else. What I am asking for is to find my father and brother and that’s it, that’s all.”

The Gaza Government Office said Wednesday that some 500,000 displaced Palestinians — almost a quarter of the enclave’s population — had made the journey to the decimated north in the first 72 hours after Israeli forces opened the Netzarim corridor, which separates it from the south.

The two Imarah brothers walked 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) to reach Al-Shujaiya, a treacherous journey they made with several small children. They found their home almost completely gone, with just one room still partially standing.

Rummaging through the rubble, Khamis came across his mother’s green knitting bag, with a couple of balls of yarn and two crochet hooks still inside, as if she had only just put it down.

Khamis and Ahmad’s mother was injured in an Israeli strike and was later evacuated to Egypt, one of the few Palestinians allowed to leave the strip to get medical treatment before Israel closed the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt in May 2024. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that only 436 patients, most of them children, had been allowed to be evacuated since May, out of the estimated 12,000 who urgently need medical evacuation.

Israeli military strikes have turned most of Gaza to rubble. According to the UN, some 69% of all structures in the strip have been destroyed or damaged in the past 15 months, with Gaza City the worst hit.

Returning after more than a year

Israel forced most residents of northern Gaza to leave the area early in the war, issuing evacuation orders and telling people to move south. Once people left, return was impossible, meaning that most of those coming back this week are doing so for the first time in more than a year. And while nine in 10 Gaza residents have been displaced during the war, those forced to flee the north have been homeless for the longest.

“You enter from one neighborhood to another and it’s all mounds of rubble that have not been cleared … and there were martyrs on the way, on the road where, until today, no one has picked them up. There are fresh bodies and bodies that have (decomposed) as well,” Khamis said.

He urged others looking to make the journey back north to reconsider. “Because there is no water, no electricity or even food, no tents, you sleep in the rubble,” he said.

Mohammad Salha, director of Al-Awda Hospital in Tal Al-Zaatar, said there is currently no space in northern Gaza to establish camps for displaced people returning home. The area was densely built-up before the war and the enormous scale of damage means there are now huge mountains of rubble and debris everywhere.

The situation in the north is so dire that some of those who have made the journey have had little choice but to turn back and return to the refugee camps down south.

Arwa Al-Masri, who was displaced from Beit Hanoun in the northeastern corner of the strip, said the men from her family went home in the past few days to see what is left of their houses.

But while she and her children cannot yet go back to her home in the north — or what remains of it — Al-Masri’s stay at the shelter is also uncertain, because of impending bans on UNRWA operations within Israel and on the prohibition of Israeli authorities from cooperating with UNRWA.

‘No one is left’

Discovering that the place they once called home was almost completely gone was just the latest in a series of heartbreaks Khamis and Ahmad Imarah have suffered over the past 15 months.

The two brothers said that of the 60 members of their extended family, only 11 have survived the war.

The family fled Al-Shujaiya after receiving text messages from the Israeli military telling them to leave the area. Khamis said the whole family — his brother and sisters and their in-laws — went to his brother’s house in Al-Mughraqa, just south of the Netzarim corridor.

“It was afternoon prayers time when our house in Al-Mughraqa was hit by a strike. I still don’t know how I got out of the house,” he said.

At one point during the interview, Ahmad’s son Walid came by. Asked by his father where his mom was, the child pointed up to the sky.

“Why did they tell us to go south? Imagine a four-year-old boy telling you here is my mother and here is my aunt, (their bodies) all ripped in pieces in front of him. I covered his face and he was screaming. His aunts, and uncles, his grandfather and an uncle, no one is left,” he said.

“We were very happy. I wish I had a picture of my newborn but I don’t have any. I waited a long time to have my daughter and then her and her mom vanished together,” he said, adding that their graves were destroyed by the Israeli military just days after the family buried them.

“You take them and bury them in the cemetery and then when you go a few days later to see the cemetery, you don’t find them because they have been erased by the bulldozers. The (Israeli forces) didn’t leave anything. Even the martyrs and the bodies they have dug up. They didn’t leave a thing,” he said, looking around the destroyed neighborhood.

“We came back to the north for nothing,” he said. But he quickly added that he was determined to stay and rebuild. “I am from Gaza and I won’t leave. Even if it was harder and more difficult than this, I want to live in Gaza and I won’t leave it. I will only leave Gaza to go to Heaven,” he said.

US President Donald Trump last week suggested Gaza should be “cleaned out” by removing Palestinians living there to Jordan and Egypt — either on a temporary or permanent basis.

The comment sparked outrage and rebuke across the Middle East, with both Egypt and Jordan rejecting the idea.

“This is ingrained in our minds, we will stay. We will not leave this place, because this land is not ours but our grandparents’ and our ancestors’ before us. How am I supposed to leave it? To leave the house of my father, and grandfather and brothers?” he said.