With children and pets in their arms and their belongings loaded onto donkey carts or car roofs, thousands of displaced Gazans headed home on Friday as a four-day Israel-Hamas truce began.

The din of fighting between the two was replaced by the horns of traffic jams and sirens of ambulances making their way through crowds emerging from hospitals and schools where they had taken refuge.

In Khan Younis town in southern Gaza, streets filled with people venturing out of homes and shelters into a landscape of buildings flattened into heaps of rubble. Displaced families with small children carried belongings in plastic bags, hoping to return at least temporarily to homes they had abandoned following Israel’s bombardment of the coastal enclave.

Header image: Displaced Palestinians ride on a donkey cart as they return to their home, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on November 24. — Reuters