GAZA – To find the place where he used to live, Noor Abed needed GPS. As he pedaled north on his bicycle along the coastal highway from the town in central Gaza...
where he had taken refuge, not even the ruins of familiar buildings could guide him. What was once his neighborhood in Gaza City is now a row of sand dunes. “There are no conditions for life here,” Abed, 35, told CNN. “No water, no electricity, no schools, and almost no phone coverage.”
The former software engineer is living in a tent he set up in the courtyard of Al-Azhar University, whose ruined campus has become a refugee center. Not all his family returned with him, worried that the nascent ceasefire may not hold. “We are waiting to be sure the war has truly ended before bringing everyone back,” he said. The men in his family are preparing a place to live for others, as bulldozers begin clearing some of the roads. “Life is beginning to return,” he said. “Somewhat.”
Adding to the overall uncertainty in Gaza are complex questions about what security might look like in the future, as a mixture of what’s left of Hamas and rival clans, gangs and militias vie for power. For many Palestinians in Gaza, however, their most immediate needs – food, shelter, water – remain the most pressing.
Just over a week after US President Donald Trump strong-armed Israel and Hamas into an agreement that halted two years of devastating war, Palestinians in Gaza are beginning to put the pieces of their lives back together. But – even if the ceasefire holds – the scale of the task is Herculean. Almost every building is damaged or destroyed beyond repair. Nearly 68,000 people are dead, according to local health officials. Thousands are missing, their bodies presumed to be under the rubble.
Gaza’s children, who number more than half of its estimated prewar population of 2.2 million, have gone without schooling for two years. Food is still hard to come by, and while the level of aid has increased since the ceasefire, there is not yet an established framework for its orderly distribution. And, as shown by the grim pictures of public executions this week, further breakdown in law and order hangs over everything. (CNN)