Updates: Israel allows displaced Palestinians to return to north Gaza

Before you go, you can learn more about the stories of Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza, here.

You can also read more about Israel’s ongoing assault on the occupied West Bank, here.

And you can follow all of our coverage on the situation in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, here.

• A child has been killed after Israeli forces attacked a horse and cart carrying people in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Palestinian media reports say.
• The Gaza Government Media Office has said that more than 300,000 people have returned to northern Gaza since Monday morning.
• A UNRWA official has slammed Israel’s decision to halt the UN agency’s operations starting from Thursday as “unacceptable”.
• US Senator Bernie Sanders has denounced President Donald Trump’s proposal to move millions of Palestinians from Gaza, urging Americans to condemn the proposal.
• The Israeli army has forced dozens of families to evacuate homes in Tulkarem amid its surging military offensive in the occupied West Bank city.

As we’ve been reporting all day, roughly 300,000 Palestinians returned to north Gaza today after Israeli troops opened the Netzarim Corridor, which has cut the Strip in half for most of the war.

An official from the Gaza Government Media Office told Al Jazeera that at least 120,000 tents are needed to shelter those displaced people who returned to destroyed homes.

Here are a few of his other comments:

• The convoys of cars returning to the north stretch for hundreds of metres.
• There is an operations room dedicated to following up on the conditions of the displaced. We heard appeals from stranded citizens who did not complete their return journey.
• More than 33 camps have been set up to accommodate the displaced.
• In the past few days, we have prepared about 50 shelters, prepared the land and dug wells.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians are returning to northern Gaza after 15 months of Israel’s war.

They’re going back to piles of rubble with buildings destroyed by Israel’s near-total destruction of the Strip, as Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili reports from Gaza City.

Watch below for more:

Forced evacuations took place during the huge ongoing raid in the northern occupied West Bank city, according to the Wafa news agency.

The Israeli army seized several buildings overlooking the Shuhada and al-Hamam neighbourhoods and turned them into military barracks after forcing residents out, according to Wafa.

The military used bulldozers to destroy some other buildings in the city, it added.

Tens of thousands of people in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem are set to lose education, healthcare and other services provided by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

An Israeli ban on the organisation takes effect on Thursday.

“It’s an unacceptable decision,” said Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for UNRWA, was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

“The people that we serve… we are not able to tell them what is going to happen to our services as of the end of this week,” Fowler also said.

UNRWA has for decades run schools and clinics in the occupied East Jerusalem, the eastern part of the city that Israel has occupied since a 1967 war, for tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have no nationality.

Israel has not announced provisions to replace UNRWA’s activities.

Isaac Herzog has slammed the UN General Assembly, marking the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, accusing the body of exhibiting “moral bankruptcy” and failing to confront anti-Semitism.

Addressing the forum during worldwide commemorations, he said: “Today, we find ourselves yet again at a dangerous crossroads in the history of this institution.”

“Rather than fulfilling its purpose and fighting courageously against a global epidemic of jihadists, murderers, and abhorrent terror, time and again this assembly has exhibited moral bankruptcy,” Herzog claimed.

Israel has repeatedly criticised the UN for its condemnation of Israel’s relentless 15-month offensive on Gaza following Hamas’s October 2023 attacks on Israel.

Thousands of displaced Palestinians walked along the main roads leading to northern Gaza, carrying what they could as they returned to their homes.

Israel opened the roadblocks today along the Netzarim Corridor, following a deal between Hamas and Israel for the release of six more captives.

Watch below for scenes from the ground:

US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, will travel to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to news website Axios.

Axios cited a US official as its source.

The UN says hundreds of thousands of displaced families are returning to northern Gaza, walking for hours through rubble to find what is left of their homes and reunite with loved ones.

UNRWA, the agency for Palestinian refugees, provides “life-saving aid”, which is central to the long-term support that the enclave requires after most of its infrastructure was destroyed by the Israeli military.

Israel plans to ban UNRWA in a bid to dismantle it, with the agency maintaining that only a sovereign Palestinian state could replace its work.

US Senator Bernie Sanders has denounced President Donald Trump’s proposal to cleanse millions of Palestinians from Gaza, urging Americans to condemn it.

“There is a name for this — ethnic cleansing — and it’s a war crime. This outrageous idea should be condemned by every American,” Sanders wrote on X in response to Trump’s controversial remarks.

Israeli forces targeted an electricity transformer in the western neighbourhood of Tulkarem city, causing a widespread power outage in various parts of the city and its refugee camp.

Wafa news agency reported that Israeli snipers, positioned in a building in the western neighbourhood, unleashed heavy fire and struck the transformer, resulting in a power outage.

Israeli forces have continued their onslaught on Tulkarem city and its camp since early afternoon, reportedly turning several residents’ homes into military outposts and sniper positions and firing live ammunition at any moving object.

Footage circulated online by local Palestinian outlets showed the moment an Israeli bulldozer uprooted trees and destroyed infrastructure in Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank. Other videos showed a fire breaking out in a house in the camp.

The Israeli prime minister plans to travel to Washington, DC, for a meeting at the White House with Trump, Axios reports.

The news website’s report cited three Israeli and US sources.

As the Israeli military carries out its seventh day of a major military operation in the occupied West Bank’s Jenin, watch our video below to find out about its decades of resistance against Israeli incursions.

The Government Media Office in Gaza says “more than 300,000 displaced” Palestinians have returned to the territory’s north after Israel’s military authorised the returns from this morning.

The brief statement on Telegram said they “returned today … to the governorates of the north” of Gaza.

Israel’s intensified military assault in the occupied West Bank marks a dangerous escalation against Palestinians, independent human rights experts warn.

A group of UN special rapporteurs and independent experts urged the international community in a statement to take principled action to protect the human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.

“We are dismayed by the escalation of deadly violence sweeping through Jenin and the rest of the occupied West Bank,” they said. “Israel’s repression seems to have no end in sight.”

“The new attacks come in the wake of a US decision to lift limited sanctions on Israeli settlers, and by Israeli authorities to remove administrative detention and other sanctions for Israeli settler violence, effectively offering a greenlight for more unchecked violence against the Palestinian people.”

Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) says it has returned to Rafah in southern Gaza after being forced out of the area by continuous bombings and evacuation orders from Israeli forces.

“It’s extremely difficult to come back to the same place that used to be full of life,” said Nadia Abo Mallouh, who supports the MSF medical coordinator who used to work in the Emirati Hospital.

“We couldn’t even recognise the streets where the Emirati Hospital was. It’s sad seeing the hospital that used to bring life to earth totally empty, no signs of life, everything is destroyed.”

Pascale Coissard, who supports MSF’s emergency coordinator, said it is still too dangerous for people to return in most areas, due to unexploded artillery and the remnants of buildings, which will take years to clean.

“As we were going to visit the former MSF Shaboura clinic in Rafah, we saw a child playing with a shell in al-Mawasi area. Although we cannot hear the bombs anymore, there are still dangers.”

Tens of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians have travelled to return to what is left from their homes in northern Gaza.

They have journeyed on foot through the damaged al-Rashid Street along Gaza’s coast, trying to make it to their homes in difficult conditions.

Al Jazeera’s Moath al-Kahlout has been following the situation on al-Rashid Street.