--- title: "More Than 100,000 Gazans Abroad Are Waiting for a Home That Isn’t Ready" description: "Nearly a year after the ceasefire, return depends on security and reconstruction that have not arrived" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-04T12:00:00Z modified: 2026-10-04T14:02:54Z url: https://rews.cc/a/more-than-100-000-gazans-abroad-are-waiting-for-a-home-that--f474c5 language: en tags: ["gaza", "refugees", "war", "reconstruction", "palestine", "mideast"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # More Than 100,000 Gazans Abroad Are Waiting for a Home That Isn’t Ready *Nearly a year after the ceasefire, return depends on security and reconstruction that have not arrived* By Nate Ledger · October 4, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/more-than-100-000-gazans-abroad-are-waiting-for-a-home-that--f474c5 ## In brief - More than 100,000 Gazans who left during the war remain abroad, Palestinian Authority figures show - Nearly a year after the ceasefire, Israeli forces hold over 60% of Gaza and conduct almost daily airstrikes - Omar al-Hassayna lost 308 members of his extended family in a November 22, 2023 strike, per Palestinian authorities - In August he watched by video as relatives buried 112 family members recovered from the rubble - About 7,000 Palestinians have returned to Gaza; Israel and Egypt vetted all who left Omar al-Hassayna left Gaza for Cairo after an Israeli airstrike killed much of his family. Three years on, he is still there, waiting for his homeland to become stable enough, safe enough and rebuilt enough to be worth going back to. “I left Gaza and came to Egypt, the land of Kinana (referring to Egypt), but at the same time, this will not be forgotten, my dear brother, it will not be forgotten,” he said. He has plenty of company in that waiting. More than 100,000 Gazans who left the enclave during the war set off by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel remain abroad, according to Palestinian Authority figures. All of them were vetted by both Israel and Egypt before their departure. All of them are still, in one way or another, mourning dead relatives, destroyed homes and neighbourhoods that no longer exist. The mechanism that was supposed to bring them home looks straightforward on paper. Nearly a year ago, a ceasefire was meant to start a process of reconstruction under a technocratic government, running alongside a political process that would lead to an eventual full Israeli withdrawal. Little of that has happened. Israeli forces still hold more than 60% of the territory and conduct almost daily airstrikes. Hamas controls most of the areas where Palestinians actually live, where people shelter mostly in temporary accommodation, on what aid agencies call inadequate aid supplies, with no prospect of reconstruction soon. The politics of that reconstruction are contentious in their own right: America’s Board of Peace has [told the UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians to stay out](https://rews.cc/a/america-s-board-of-peace-tells-gaza-s-refugee-agency-to-keep-a606cb) of the strip’s rebuilding, a ruling Hamas said amounted to adopting Israel’s position. Meanwhile, the physical fact of what would need rebuilding keeps getting more precise — a [building-by-building count of the destruction](https://rews.cc/a/gaza-from-above-a-landscape-erased-counted-building-by-build-e543ea), based on new mapping imagery and UN assessments, gives some sense of what “waiting for reconstruction” actually refers to. Hassayna’s own ledger is specific. Some 308 members of his extended family were killed when Israeli strikes destroyed a cluster of Gaza City apartment buildings where they had gathered for shelter on November 22, 2023, according to Palestinian authorities. Among the dead were his wife, four of their adult sons and four small grandchildren, including an infant a few months old. In August, he watched on video from Cairo as relatives buried 112 family members — among them his wife, sons and grandchildren — whose bodies had been recovered from the rubble. Dozens are still missing. What remains of the family is distributed across three countries in a way that maps, roughly, onto the war’s logistics. His oldest son Mohammed is in Cairo with his own four children. The widow of one of his dead sons is there too, with her daughter, as are his brothers. One daughter was medically evacuated to Turkey with her husband and six children. Another daughter remains in Gaza with her five children; her husband was killed in the same strike. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the details of the November 22 strike. It said its attacks in Gaza are directed at military targets, while trying to reduce harm to civilians. Exile has an economics to it, and Hassayna’s is unusually literal. He owned a business in Gaza selling tools for firefighting and safety equipment. Some of the stock survived the war, and he periodically sells pieces of it to fund his stay in Cairo, where he has remarried. The return question, for those 100,000, is partly about permission and partly about arithmetic. Some Israeli politicians have urged a policy of encouraging Gaza’s entire population to leave and preventing those who left from coming back. In practice, about 7,000 Palestinians have returned. Hassayna believes Egypt will stop any widespread displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. But a widespread return is unlikely until the territory’s prospects are clearer than they are now — and nearly a year into the ceasefire that was supposed to clarify them, they are not. > “If Gaza returns. If there is an international agreement (with) a comprehensive situation for the Palestinian people and construction begins, why would I delay?” “I am waiting for the opportunity, I am waiting for the moment when Gaza becomes stable so I can return to my country, and be a productive member of this country, and be a positive force for the country,” he said. Getting out required vetting by two governments. Getting back requires something neither of them has delivered.