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as required by the plan, even if it steps aside from Gaza’s government.

A part of Trump’s deal was completed on Friday when Israel agreed a ceasefire and withdrew its forces from parts of Gaza, allowing displaced families to begin trekking back to their homes, many of them wrecked by Israeli bombardments.

According to Gaza’s civil defence agency, a rescue service operating under Hamas authority, more than 500,000 people had returned to Gaza City by yesterday evening.

“We walked for hours, and every step was filled with fear and anxiety for my home,” Raja Salmi, 52, told AFP.

When she reached the Al-Rimal neighbourhood, she found her house utterly destroyed.

“I stood before it and cried. All those memories are now just dust,” she said.

Aerial footage of the city filmed by AFP showed whole city blocks reduced to a twisted mess of concrete and steel reinforcing wire, the walls and windows of five-storey apartment blocks ripped off and left choking the roadsides as disconsolate residents returned.

The United Nations humanitarian office says Israel has allowed agencies to start transporting 170,000 tonnes of aid into Gaza if the ceasefire holds.

The top US officer in the Middle East, CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper, visited Gaza yesterday to discuss setting up what he described on social media as a “civil-military coordination centre” which will “support conflict stabilisation.”

The US military will coordinate a multinational taskforce which will deploy in Gaza and is likely to include troops from Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates -- but no American boots on the ground inside the territory itself.

Under the ceasefire deal pushed by Trump, Hamas has until noon tomorrow to hand over 47 remaining Israeli hostages -- living and dead -- from the 251 abducted during its October 7 attack on Israel two years ago.

The remains of one more hostage, held in Gaza since 2014, are also expected to be returned.

In exchange, Israel will release 250 prisoners, including some of those serving life sentences for deadly anti-Israeli attacks, and 1,700 Gazans detained by the military since the war broke out.

High-profile inmate Marwan Barghouti -- from Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement -- is among those the group wanted to see released, according to Egyptian state-linked media.

However, Israel said Barghouti would not be part of the exchange.

The Israeli prison service said Saturday it had moved the 250 national security detainees to the prisons of Ofer, in the occupied West Bank, and Ketziot in southern Israel’s Negev desert, ahead of the handover.

Many parts of the Trump proposal still have not been agreed upon, including its plans for post-war governance and its insistence that Hamas disarm.

Hamas political bureau member Hossam Badran yesterday said the group is ready to fight back if US Trump’s peace deal unravels and hostilities with Israel resume in the Gaza Strip.

He said the negotiations over phase two of the plan will be complex and difficult. “The second phase of the Trump plan, as it is clear from the points themselves, contains many complexities and difficulties.”

At Al-Rantisi hospital in Gaza City, a facility for children and cancer patients, AFP footage showed wards reduced to heaps of overturned metal beds, gaping ceilings and scattered medical equipment.

Men, women and children navigated streets filled with rubble, searching for homes amid collapsed concrete slabs, destroyed vehicles and debris.

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protesters marched in several cities in Europe yesterday, voicing cautious hope with a dose of scepticism as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza entered its second day.