By allowing Palestinians to return to northern Gaza on Monday, January 27, as part of the ceasefire deal reached between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli government has abandoned one of its primary operations in the 15-month war waged against the Palestinian movement. The Israeli army had ordered the evacuation of this area, the most densely populated in the territory with 1.3 million residents, at the start of the war, which began with the October 7 massacre. Most of the population fled to the south, where they crowded into a so-called humanitarian zone for 15 months. The northern part of the territory, partly emptied of its inhabitants and largely destroyed by Israeli strikes, looked set to remain so for a long time to come, perhaps even becoming a new area for military installations or, according to the plans of certain settler groups, Jewish settlements.

In the space of 48 hours, some 376,000 people were able to reach the north, according to the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs, which coordinates humanitarian aid, by crossing the Netzarim corridor – a no-man's-land that the Israeli army had built to cut Gaza in two. This is the outcome of one of the clauses – along with the release of 33 hostages held by Hamas – of the first phase of the agreement, which came into force on January 19 and which few observers believed in, according to Mairav Zonszein, an analyst for the Israel-Palestine think-tank International Crisis Group: "Depopulating this part of the enclave was the Israeli army's first real action in this war. Now that the Palestinians are returning and the truce is holding, the dynamic is changing, with strong support [in Israel] for the return of hostages, especially as no one believes Benjamin Netanyahu's promises of 'total victory' [over Hamas]. It's going to become more complicated for Israel to take up the fight again."

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