Will displaced Palestinians return home?

As the Israel-Hamas conflict continues in Gaza, the fate of Palestinians displaced by the fighting remains in the balance. Will they be able to turn home after the war? The last three months were an odyssey, a quest for safety that does not exist in Gaza. Muhammed Ali and his family have had to search for new accommodation several times — his home in Gaza City was destroyed by Israeli strikes, he says.

“We initially sought shelter in Al-Quds Hospital, which was close to our former home. When we were told [by the army] that we had to evacuate there, we went to Nuseirat refugee camp [in the center of the Gaza Strip]. Currently, we are in Rafah,” says Ali in a text message on WhatsApp, referring to the southernmost city near the Egyptian border.

Three months after Israel declared war, the 35-year-old civil engineer is not only worried about his and his family’s daily survival, but also about what the future in Gaza will look like. Some prominent Israeli politicians and ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government have questioned whether Gaza’s population should be allowed to return home at all.

“We hope that permanent forced displacement will not occur, that the war will end, and that people will return to their homes. Enough of what has happened; everything must come to an end,” Ali says.

Neither Israel’s war cabinet nor the expanded security cabinet have adopted official policies on post-war Gaza yet. The priority in the political and public discourse remains the “elimination” of the militant-Islamist Hamas, responsible for the terrorist attacks of October 7 in which more than 1,200 people died, and the liberation of the more than 130 hostages still being held in the Gaza Strip.

Far-right Israeli politicians such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir make no secret of the fact that they envisage Gaza’s future without most of its Palestinian inhabitants. They want the territory populated with new Israeli settlers.

“What needs to be done in Gaza is to encourage emigration,” Smotrich said in a recent interview with Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the whole discussion for the day after will look completely different.”

In separate statements, Ben Gvir also called for the “voluntary” migration of hundreds of thousands of people from the Gaza Strip. Other members of the cabinet have expressed similar ideas.

Israeli media reported on negotiations with third countries that would be willing to take in Palestinians, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Chad. All three countries have rejected these reports as untrue. DRC’s government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, that there has “never been any form of negotiation, discussion or initiative between Kinshasa and Israel about the reception of Palestinian migrants on Congolese soil.”

According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, an estimated 1.9 million people — around 85% of the population — are now considered displaced. Hundreds of thousands are currently seeking refuge in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt.

The immense destruction in Gaza — over60% of Gaza’s housing units are reportedly destroyed or damaged — reinforces the concern that it is questionable how a return home will even be possible, says Mustafa Ibrahim, a human rights activist and political analyst, from Rafah.