Palestinians have burst into the streets to celebrate and return to the rubble of their bombed-out homes after a ceasefire deal halted fighting in the Gaza Strip and as three female hostages freed by Hamas were reunited with their mothers inside Israel.
Armed Hamas fighters drove through the southern city of Khan Younis with crowds cheering and chanting.
In the north of the territory, bombed into oblivion in the war’s most intense fighting, people picked their way on narrow roads through a devastated landscape of rubble and twisted metal.
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“I feel like at last I found some water to drink after being lost in the desert for 15 months,” Aya, a displaced woman from Gaza city who has been sheltering in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip for over a year, said after the fighting stopped.
“I feel alive again.”