Gazans cheer as ceasefire takes hold, Hamas frees first hostages

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.

DAMASCUS: Syrian security forces destroyed seized drugs Sunday including around 100 million pills of the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon — whose production and trafficking flourished under ousted president Bashar Assad, an official said.
A 2022 AFP investigation found that Syria under Assad had become a narco state, with the $10-billion captagon industry dwarfing all other exports and funding both his regime and many of his enemies.
“We destroyed large quantities of narcotic pills,” said official Badr Youssef, including “about 100 million captagon pills and 10 to 15 tons of hashish” as well as raw materials used to produce captagon.
He spoke from the Damascus headquarters of the defunct Fourth Division where the drugs were seized. The Fourth Division, a notorious branch of the Syrian army, was controlled by Assad’s brother Maher.
The official SANA news agency said “the anti-narcotics department of the (interior) ministry is destroying narcotic substances seized at the headquarters of the Fourth Division.”
An AFP photographer saw security personnel in a Fourth Division warehouse load dozens of bags filled with pills and other drugs into trucks, before taking them to a field to be burned.
On December 8, Islamist-led rebels ousted Assad after a lightning offensive that lasted less than two weeks. The army and Assad’s security apparatus collapsed as the new authorities seized control of Damascus.
On Saturday, SANA reported that authorities had seized “a huge warehouse belonging to the former regime” in the coastal city of Latakia. It said the factory “specialized in packing captagon pills into children’s toys and furniture.”
On Sunday, an AFP photographer visited the warehouse near the port and saw security personnel dismantling children’s bicycles that contained the small white pills.
Captagon pills had also been hidden inside objects such as doors, shisha water pipes and car parts, he reported.
Abu Rayyan, a security official in Latakia, said that “about 50 to 60 million captagon pills” had been seized that “belonged to the Fourth Division.”
“This is the largest such warehouse in the area,” he said.
Abu Rayyan said the drugs had been packed for export from Latakia “to neighboring countries,” and that they would be destroyed.