NUSEIRAT, Gaza Strip (Dispatches) – A vast crowd of Gazans massed near an Israeli military barrier preventing them from heading to their homes in the north on Sunday amid a row over the terms of their ceasefire deal.
Local health officials said Zionist forces fired on the crowd, martyring two people and wounding nine.
A day after a second exchange of Israeli captives held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the holdup underlined the Zionist regime’s habitual non-committal to its obligations.
The development came as U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that most of Gaza’s population should be resettled elsewhere, including in Egypt and Jordan, to “just clean out” the war-ravaged enclave. Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians have previously rejected such a scenario, fearing Israel might never allow refugees to return.
Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said Palestinians would never accept such a proposal. He said the Palestinians can rebuild Gaza “even better than before” if Israel lifts its blockade.
Under the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, the Zionist regime on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza on foot through the Netzarim corridor bisecting Gaza. Israel put that on hold until Hamas frees a captive who the occupying regime claimed should have been released Saturday, but the Palestinian resistance movement denied.
Hamas said Israel was using the issue as a pretext to delay Palestinians’ return to their homes. In a statement, the group said it had told mediators that the captive in question was alive and provided guarantees that she would be released.
Crowds of people carrying their belongings filled a main road leading to the closed Israeli checkpoint. “We have been in agony for a year and a half,” said Nadia Qasem.
Fadi al-Sinwar, also displaced from Gaza City, said “the fate of more than a million people is linked to one person,” referring to the Israeli captive, Arbel Yehoud.
“A sea of people is waiting for a signal to move back to Gaza City and the north, people are fed up and they want to go home,” asked Tamer al-Burai, a displaced person from Gaza City. “This is the deal that was signed, isn’t it?”
“Many of those people have no idea whether their houses back home are still standing. But they want to go regardless, they want to put up the tents next to the rubble of their houses, they want to feel home,” he said.
On Sunday, witnesses said many people had slept overnight on the Salahuddin Road, the main thoroughfare running north to south and on the coastal road leading north, waiting to go past the Israeli military positions in the Netzarim corridor running across the centre of the Gaza Strip.
Vehicles, trucks and rickshaws were overloaded with mattresses, food, and with the tents that used to shelter them for over a year in the central and southern areas of the enclave and volunteers were distributing water and food.
Zionist forces fired on the crowds on three occasions overnight and into Sunday, killing two people and wounding nine, including a child, according to Al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties.
Israel has pulled back from several areas of Gaza as part of the ceasefire, which came into effect last Sunday. But the military still operates in a “buffer zone” it has set up illegally inside Gaza in the Netzarim corridor.
On Saturday, Trump instructed the U.S. military to release 2,000-pound bombs that his predecessor Joe Biden had ordered to be withheld from delivery to Israel.
The ceasefire is aimed at ending the 15-month Israeli war on Gaza and freeing captives still held in Gaza in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Around 90 captives are still in Gaza, and Israeli authorities believe at least a third, and up to half, have died.
Itzik Horn, the father of captives Iair and Eitan Horn, called any resumption of fighting “a death sentence” for those held in Gaza and criticized Zionists ministers who want the war to go on.
The ceasefire’s first phase runs until early March and includes the release of 33 captives and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The second — and far more difficult — phase, has yet to be negotiated. Hamas has said it will not release the remaining captives without an end to the war, while Israel has threatened to resume its onslaught until Hamas is destroyed.
Israel’s military onslaught has martyred over 47,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Israeli bombardment and ground invasions have flattened wide swaths of Gaza and displaced around 90% of its population of 2.3 million people. Many who have returned home since the ceasefire began have found only mounds of rubble.
Since the ceasefire went into effect, the Zionist regime has launched a brutal onslaught in the occupied West Bank.
On Sunday, Israeli forces shot and killed a two-year-old Palestinian girl in Jenin as they stepped up their invasions in the territory.
The Palestinian health ministry said that Laila al-Khatib died of “critical wounds” after being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers.