Returning to Beit Lahia: Video diaries of a 21-year-old Palestinian's journey home
Leena Ibrahim Almadhoun returned home to find it had utterly changed.
Born in Beit Lahia, 21-year-old Leena Ibrahim Almadhoun says she spent all her life in northern Gaza.
When she wasn't studying for her psychology degree at the Islamic University, Almadhoun says she devoted her free time to practicing her hobby, photography. "I used to love capturing everything in Gaza -- its sea, air and streets," she told ABC News.
Israel's 15-month war on the enclave that followed the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, left very little of those streets she used to photograph, according to Almadhoun.

On Sunday, the first day of the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, she says she returned to Beit Lahia with her parents to find it completely changed, with more rubble than buildings, ghostly silence instead of familiar noises, and other members of her family still away, further south in Gaza.
Almadhoun started packing the moment she heard about the ceasefire, planning to document the journey back to her home in Beit Lahia. "We have reached the decisive moment. We are ready," she said in a video shared with ABC News, while closing boxes with tape, the night before moving back.
"We are ready before the announcement of the truce, to return to the north," she said.
On Sunday morning, her father placed those boxes packed with belongings on a cart, and they started making their way home after being displaced for months.

"Due to the lack of transportation, we walked on foot in the destruction," Almadhoun said in a video showing a landscape marked by destruction, walking next to her mother. "For an hour we have been walking and jumping over the rubble because the streets are so destroyed," she said, reminiscing about the difficult journey.
Although the conditions were challenging, she said she found strength in knowing it was the last time they would have to move around due to the conflict. "The last day I am tired of walking, the last day!" she said in a selfie video during the walk.

Almadhoun's visible joy was mixed with the sadness of seeing familiar places reduced to debris, barely recognizing them. "My mother was definitely lost and could not recognize the places," she told ABC News.
However, Almadhoun was overcome with happiness as soon as she saw her house still standing, the bitterness fading away and leaving space for a new hope she said she had not felt in months.

Stepping foot into the green street where she grew up, in sharp contrast with the grey landscape of ruins that is now most of northern Gaza, and seeing her building still intact, she said she felt like she was in paradise.
"I swear to God, I feel like I am in heaven, in heaven, in heaven. Praise be to God, our house was not destroyed. May the earth be green," she said in a video, showing the big white house where she grew up with no major damage.
Like others in Gaza, after 15 months, Leena Almadhoun is back home.
But with nearly 60% of buildings in the Gaza Strip damaged or destroyed since the start of the war, according to a Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite analysis by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, many are left with nothing but rubble to return to.
"I packed my bag with so much love, organizing it while imagining the moment I’d arrive home, hoping it would still be safe," Almadhoun told ABC News.
She said she included the jacket with her project's logo, a startup she developed during the war called Thamra, which focuses on supporting agriculture in order to ensure food security. The project, which has attracted over 10,000 followers on Instagram already, holds much of her future, she said.
"It helped achieve self-sufficiency during the famine we experience in northern Gaza," she said. "All my hope is that I will return stronger and work tirelessly on Thamra in Beit Lahia."