Israel blocks thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza

CAIRO: Tens of thousands of Palestinians waited at roadblocks to return to their homes in northern Gaza on Sunday, voicing frustration after Israel accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire agreement and refused to open crossing points.

A day after a second exchange of Israeli hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the holdup underlined the risks hanging over the truce between Hamas and Israel, longtime adversaries in a series of Gaza wars.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, will travel to Israel on Wednesday to oversee the Gaza ceasefire, Israel’s Channel 13 reported on Sunday, citing two Israeli officials.

In central Gaza, columns of people were waiting along the main roads leading north, some in vehicles and some on foot, witnesses said.

“A sea of people is waiting for a signal to move back to Gaza City and the north,” said 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 told Reuters via a chat app.

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 pass the Israeli military positions in the Netzarim corridor running across the centre of the Gaza Strip.

Al-Awda Hospital officials said one Palestinian was killed and 15 others wounded by Israeli fire, from soldiers apparently trying to prevent people coming too close along the coastal road. The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at suspects who posed a threat to its troops.

Cars, trucks and rickshaws were overloaded with mattresses, food, and the tents that served as shelters for over a year for those in the central and southern areas of the enclave.

Under the agreement worked out with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the U.S., Israel was meant to allow Palestinians displaced from the north to return to their homes.

But Israel said that Hamas’ failure to hand over a list detailing who of the hostages scheduled for release were alive or to hand over Arbel Yehud, an Israeli woman taken hostage from her kibbutz home during the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, meant it had violated the agreement.

As a result, checkpoints in central Gaza would not be opened to allow crossings into the north, it said in a statement. Hamas blamed Israel for the delay and accused it of stalling.

Mediators were holding intensive talks to resolve the dispute and see Yehud freed earlier than the next scheduled swap on Saturday, a Palestinian and an Israeli official said.

An official with the Gaza fighter group that is holding her, Islamic Jihad, said such an accommodation has been agreed but the Israeli official said talks were still ongoing, though progress had been made.

‘DEMOLITION SITE’

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 over concern about their impact on the civilian population of Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for giving “Israel the tools it needs to defend itself, to confront our common enemies and to secure a future of peace and prosperity”.

Trump also called on Egypt and Jordan to take on more Palestinians from Gaza either temporarily or permanently, and saying “we should just clear out the whole thing”.

“It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there,” he told reporters after a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah.
In response, an official of Hamas, the Palestinia group that runs Gaza, echoed longstanding Palestinian fears about being driven permanently from their homes.

Palestinians “will not accept any offers or solutions, even if (such offers) appear to have good intentions under the guise of reconstruction, as announced in the proposals of U.S. President Trump,” Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told Reuters.

Many of the stranded Palestinians on the roads leading north also rejected Trump’s proposed solution.

“If he thinks he will forcibly displace the Palestinian people (then) this is impossible, impossible, impossible. The Palestinian people firmly believe that this land is theirs, this soil is their soil,” said Magdy Seidam.

“No matter how much Israel tries to destroy, break, and to show people that it had won, in reality it did not win.”

The Israeli military issued warnings to Palestinians not to approach its positions in Gaza and said soldiers had fired warning shots on several occasions but said “as of now, we are unaware of any harm caused to the suspects as a result of the shooting.”