AP PHOTOS: Returning Palestinians try to make their shattered houses homes again

JABALIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Nassar family managed to assemble a semblance of their home’s old living room. A sofa and some chairs survived, along with a small table they can gather around to eat. The room’s wall had been almost entirely blown away, so they hung sheets over the gaping hole, hiding the mound of wreckage outside.

Buried somewhere under that rubble, Khalid Nassar knows, is the body of his son Mahmoud. It has lain there unretrievable for the past four months since he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

This has been the struggle for displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in Gaza under the nearly month-old ceasefire: To re-create some bit of normal lives amid the death and destruction left by 16 months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives against Hamas fighters.

Finding ways to settle in

Coming home after months — or more than a year — of living in tents or other shelters, families have no means to do any serious rebuilding. So they find little ways to settle in.

Apartment buildings that were reduced to hollowed-out skeletons have been draped with colorful bed linens serving as walls — as if the houses have been turned inside-out. Families dig chunks of concrete and mangled metal out of the interior to make them semi-habitable. Rooms look like fragmented movie sets, with furniture arranged in any intact corner, while the remaining walls are shattered.

The Nassars fled their home in Jabaliya refugee camp early last year, moving around northern Gaza. Khalid Nassar's son Mahmoud was killed in October when he tried to go back home to retrieve some clothes in the neighboring building, which they also owned, and a strike hit it, Nassar said. His daughter was also killed in a separate airstrike on her home in Jabaliya,...