On Monday, January 27, the Netzarim corridor, which had separated the north and south of Gaza, finally opened. As soon as it did, Hassan al-Goulah, a 38-year-old humanitarian aid truck driver, began his long walk from central Gaza to Shajaiye, a historic neighborhood in Gaza's Old City, determined to return to the exact spot where his home had stood before it was destroyed by an Israeli missile at the start of the war triggered by the October 7 terrorist attack. "I pitched my tent on the rubble," he wrote in a WhatsApp message; foreign journalists are still barred from Gaza.

According to the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 376,000 other Palestinians also returned to northern Gaza between the morning of Monday, January 27 and noon on Tuesday, January 28, thanks to the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Half of these displaced people were men, with women and children accounting for a quarter each, said OCHA, citing figures from a working group of NGOs that have set up counting stations across the territory.

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