Tens of thousands of Palestinians returned to areas of Gaza where Israeli forces had withdrawn on Sunday to find scenes of vast destruction and bodies hidden beneath the rubble, as President Donald Trump headed to the region to finalize a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas. In the three days since the ceasefire was announced across Gaza, some 500,000 are estimated to have returned to Gaza City, which has borne the brunt of Israel’s firepower in recent weeks.Palestinians shared images showing entire neighborhoods razed to the ground. Some posted videos expressing relief that their home was still standing after two years of one of the most devastating aerial bombardments in modern history, the primary weapon in an assault that international experts have declared a genocide. Read more: How the Trump Administration Sealed the Gaza Ceasefire DealRami Mohammad-Ali, 37, described seeing bodies scattered along the roadside as he returned to Gaza City. “We couldn’t believe the destruction we have seen,” he told Reuters by phone after walking nearly ten miles from Deir Al Balah to Gaza City. “We are joyful to return…but at the same time we have bitter feelings about the destruction,” he said.It came as preparations were underway in Israel to receive 20 living hostages and 28 bodies that had been held by Hamas since the group launched a surprise terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In Gaza, the same preparations were being made to receive 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted of serious crimes, and 1,700 who were seized by Israel during the war and held without charge, including 22 children. President Trump is expected to arrive in Israel on Monday to address the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and meet with the families of Israeli hostages. He will then travel to Egypt for a summit with world leaders on a more permanent end to the Gaza war, and discussions on post-war governance of the territory. Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday that Trump was also hoping to meet with the newly freed hostages.“Knock on wood, but we feel very confident the hostages will be released and this president is actually traveling to the Middle East, likely this evening, in order to meet them and greet them in person,” Vance told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”Read more: I Spent 491 Days as a Hostage of Hamas. This Is My StoryWhile Israel and Hamas have accepted the two-phase agreement, many of the more difficult issues have been left unresolved. Hamas has not yet agreed to fully disarm, it is not yet clear who will govern Gaza after the war, and the full scope of Israel’s withdrawal has yet to be determined. The fate of a long-term peace will be determined at the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is being hosted by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and attended by 20 world leaders, among them German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.Trump, who until recently touted U.S. tutelage of Gaza, mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, and an internationally-owned “Riviera” in the territory, is hoping to build on the immediate success of the ceasefire to forge a lasting peace with the involvement of Arab countries and Israel. “I think you are going to have tremendous success and Gaza is going to be rebuilt,” Trump said Friday ahead of the summit. “And you have some very wealthy countries, as you know, over there. It would take a small fraction of their wealth to do that. And I think they want to do it.”There was hope and trepidation among the families of hostages over the weekend as the ceasefire held. White House Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner addressed a crowd of thousands at a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening in Hostages’ Square, where the crowd booed the mention of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and cheered Trump. Many hostage families have criticized Netanyahu for not doing enough to secure the release of their loved ones and for— in their view—prolonging the war for his own political benefit. “To the hostages themselves, our brothers and sisters, you are coming home,” Witkoff told the crowd, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.Rotem Cooper told the BBC that he was waiting to receive the body of his father, Amiram, who was killed in Hamas captivity, so he could begin the process of mourning.“Everybody is on edge, wanting to make sure that none of the sides are breaking the agreement in any way. Everybody is worried that Hamas might be saying it can’t locate [their loved one],” he told the BBC. Meanwhile, aid agencies were urging the removal of all restrictions on aid to address the famine conditions that had been confirmed in Gaza City. The United Nations said it has only been able to deliver around 20% of the aid needed in Gaza due to Israeli restrictions and danger caused by the fighting.Those restrictions caused widespread hunger across Gaza, and famine in Gaza City. The United Nations World Food Program said on Saturday that it had begun scaling up its operations in Gaza, as other aid groups said they still had not been able to gain access to the territory due to Israeli restrictions on entry. U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher outlined on Friday a 60-day plan to flood Gaza with aid. “ Our supplies, 170,000 metric tons – food, medicine and other supplies – are in place. And our team – courageous and expert and determined – are in place,” he said at a press briefing. “We will scale up the provision of food across Gaza to reach 2.1 million people who need food aid and around 500,000 people who need nutrition. Famine must be reverted in areas where it has taken hold and prevented in others,” he added. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, said it was still being blocked from bringing supplies into the territory. Attention will now also turn to the huge task of reconstruction inside Gaza. Over the course of two years of Israeli ground operations and airstrikes, 92% of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged, according to the United Nations. Only 39% of hospitals in the territory are functional, and 89% of the U.N.’s water, sanitation, and hygiene assets have been destroyed or damaged.Famine in Gaza was confirmed in August by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a food security body backed by the U.N. Nearly 55,000 children younger than 5 were suffering from a life-threatening type of malnourishment by early August, according to a study published Wednesday by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the main healthcare provider to Palestinian refugees.The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGC) also concluded in August that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Weeks later, a U.N. commission of inquiry found that Israel had met four of the five genocidal acts in Gaza laid out by the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. These included “killing Palestinians, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”Israel has consistently denied accusations of genocide. In his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September, Netanyahu said regarding genocide claims that “the opposite is true,” citing millions of leaflets dropped by the IDF and millions of texts sent ahead of military operations in Gaza.Israel’s attack on Gaza was launched in response to a Hamas attack on southern Israel in which it killed 1,200—mostly civilians—and took 250 hostage. Over 67,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 169,000 also injured in the time since, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and health officials said over the weekend that more bodies are being discovered under the rubble in areas where the Israeli army has withdrawn.In the absence of independent monitoring on the ground, the ministry is the primary source for casualty data relied upon by humanitarian groups, journalists, and international bodies. The ministry’s figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, but it says around half the deaths were women and children. The ministry’s figures cannot be independently verified by TIME, but the Israeli army’s own casualty figures suggest a Palestinian civilian death rate of 83%. — With additional reporting by Callum Sutherland.