GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians made their way back to their Gaza neighborhoods on Saturday, weaving through dust-shrouded streets as bulldozers clawed through the wreckage of two years of war and a ceasefire held in its second day.
Aid groups urged Israel to reopen more crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, and about 200 U.S. troops arrived in Israel to help retrieve hostages and monitor the ceasefire with Hamas.
The U.S. troops will set up a center to facilitate the flow of aid as well as logistical and security assistance. The head of the U.S. military’s Central Command said he visited Gaza on Saturday to prepare it.
“This great effort will be achieved with no U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza,” Adm. Brad Cooper said in a statement, noting that his command would lead the center.
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 neighborhoods have been reduced to dust,” UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram told The Associated Press on Friday from central Gaza.
“A ceasefire alone is not enough,” 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.”
Tons of desperately needed food
The World Food Program said 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, U.N. agencies provided food at 400 distribution points.
A U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet public, said Israel has approved expanded aid deliveries, starting 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 U.S.- 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 had entered Gaza on Friday, although many crossings remain closed.
The aid is among the 170,000 metric tons of food aid that have been positioned in neighboring countries awaiting permission from Israel to restart deliveries.
Israel braces for hostages’ return
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 toward ending the war ignited by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, flattened entire neighborhoods and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s more than 2 million people, some multiple times.
In Israel, families were awaiting the return of hostages taken in the 2023 attack. The government believes around 20 of the hostages remain alive.
“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 Hostages Square.
A future for Gaza
Questions remain on who will govern Gaza after Israeli troops gradually pull back and whether Hamas will disarm, as called for in the ceasefire agreement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unilaterally ended the previous ceasefire 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,” Netanyahu said Friday, pledging that the next stage would bring Hamas’s disarmament.
The scale of destruction will become clearer if the truce holds in the weeks ahead, but more than three out of every four buildings have been destroyed, the U.N. said in September — a volume of debris equivalent to 25 Eiffel Towers, much of it likely toxic.
A February assessment by the European Union and World Bank estimated $49 billion in damage, including $16 billion to housing and $6.3 billion to the health sector.
The death toll is expected to rise as more bodies that couldn’t be retrieved during Israel’s offensive are found.
A manager at northern Gaza’s Shifa Hospital told the AP that 45 bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza City had arrived over the past 24 hours. The manager, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said the bodies had been missing for several days to two weeks.
New security arrangements on the ground
U.S. 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.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff told Israeli officials on Friday that the United States would establish a center in Israel to coordinate 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 the AP. Another official who was not authorized to speak to the media confirmed the contents of the readout.
The readout said no U.S. soldiers will be on the ground in Gaza, but there will be people who report to the U.S. and aircraft might operate over the strip for monitoring.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel in the 2023 attack, 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 doesn’t 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 U.N. 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.
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Metz reported from Jerusalem, El Deeb from Beirut and Mednick from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writers Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut and Jon Gambrell in Cairo contributed to this report.
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