The return of Palestinians released under the ongoing prisoner exchange has brought fleeting moments of joy across Gaza, embraces filled with tears, flags raised in trembling hands, voices breaking under the weight of disbelief. Yet beneath the brief celebration lies a heart-wrenching truth: those who have returned find no homes to enter, no hospitals to heal them, and no certainty that survival itself is possible.

Many of the released have emerged from years of detention weak, scarred, and in urgent need of medical care. But Gaza’s shattered health system, stripped by siege and bombed beyond recognition, can offer little more than bandages where surgery is needed, silence where medicine should be found. Families crowd around what remains of medical centres, desperate to find a place for their loved ones, while others line up at closed border gates, hoping for an evacuation that never comes.

For most, the homecoming is bittersweet. Their neighbourhoods are no longer recognisable, turned into wastelands of twisted iron and concrete dust. Schools that once echoed with children’s laughter stand hollow and roofless. Hospitals are dark, with machines silent from lack of power. Yet amid the ruins, people still cling to one another, their humanity, their resilience, their quiet determination to rebuild from nothing.

As one man whispered while watching his brother carried on a stretcher through the rubble, “He came back alive, but Gaza itself is dying.”