Hawra al-Dujaili walked the length of what used to be her street in Basra’s Hayyaniyah district for nearly twenty minutes Sunday before she recognized her own front gate, the bent metal still painted the pale green her late father had chosen. Everything behind it was gone.

“The neighbors told me which pile was ours,” al-Dujaili, 41, said, holding a UN-issued plastic folder of identity documents. “Without them I would have kept walking.”

Twelve days after a ceasefire formally ended six weeks of war between Israel and Iran, hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians are streaming back into southern Iraq, western Iran and northern Yemen to find neighborhoods that no longer exist on the maps they remember. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Sunday that registered returns across the three countries had passed 410,000 since the April 15 cessation, far outpacing the agency’s planning estimates and straining a humanitarian corridor that aid officials say was already running on emergency funding.

“We expected returns to begin in earnest by the second week of May,” said Mireille Thibault, UNHCR’s deputy regional coordinator for the Gulf response, speaking from Amman. “Instead they began the day after the ceasefire, and they have not slowed. We are now sequencing food, shelter and unexploded-ordnance clearance against a population that is essentially arriving faster than we can survey the ground.”

The pressure is most acute in Basra, Abadan and Khorramshahr, the densely populated cities along the Shatt al-Arab waterway that absorbed sustained Iranian and Israeli strikes during the war’s final ten days. Iraqi civil defense officials confirmed Sunday that 38 neighborhoods in greater Basra had been designated structurally unsafe, and that more than 11,000 housing units in Basra governorate alone had been classified as destroyed or beyond repair. In Khuzestan province on the Iranian side, provincial authorities have begun bussing returnees to temporary cantonments outside Ahvaz after several families attempted to occupy partially collapsed buildings.

“We are asking people who have been away from home for fifty days to wait a little longer,” Khuzestan deputy governor Behzad Ranjbar said in remarks carried by IRNA on Sunday. “It is the hardest message to deliver.”

The scale of destruction has also reopened a politically delicate debate over who will pay for reconstruction. A preliminary damage assessment circulated last week by the World Bank and the Iraqi planning ministry put combined infrastructure losses across Iraq’s southern governorates at roughly $14.8 billion, with another $7.2 billion estimated for Yemen and a figure not yet released for Iran. Donors at a hastily convened pledging conference in Kuwait City on Thursday committed $3.1 billion in immediate humanitarian support, including $850 million from Saudi Arabia and $600 million from the European Union, but officials privately acknowledged that the gap between relief and reconstruction remained wide.

“Humanitarian financing buys tents and water trucks,” said Karim Mounajed, a Beirut-based development economist at the Levant Policy Institute. “It does not rebuild a power substation or a sewage main. The reconstruction conversation has barely started, and the families coming home now will be the ones living inside that gap.”

Unexploded ordnance has emerged as the most immediate killer of the post-war period. The UN Mine Action Service said Sunday it had logged 47 civilian casualties from unexploded munitions across the three countries since the ceasefire, including 19 deaths, most of them children. Iraqi army engineering units, supplemented by Jordanian and Egyptian clearance teams who arrived last week, have begun a grid-by-grid sweep of Basra’s southern suburbs but expect the work to take months.

In Yemen, where the Houthi authorities and the internationally recognized government in Aden have been holding indirect technical talks on humanitarian access since April 20, returns have lagged behind those in Iraq and Iran. Aid groups attributed the difference to continued political uncertainty and to the lighter physical destruction in most Houthi-held areas, where strikes were largely confined to coastal radar and missile sites. The World Food Programme nonetheless warned Sunday that food stocks in Hodeidah and Sanaa governorates would run out by mid-May without a fresh shipping window through the Red Sea, which has only partially reopened to commercial traffic.

The U.S. State Department on Sunday announced an additional $420 million in humanitarian assistance, citing what spokesperson Allison Krieger called “the scale and the speed of civilian return.” A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the administration was weighing a longer-term reconstruction package but that any such proposal would have to navigate a deeply divided Congress still litigating the war’s political costs. Iran has not been offered direct U.S. assistance and is not expected to be, the official said, though Washington has not objected to multilateral aid flowing to Iranian civilians through UN channels.

For families like al-Dujaili’s, the political architecture matters less than the next two weeks. She has registered for a UNHCR cash-transfer program that will pay $340 a month for three months, and has secured a place for her two children at a temporary school being run out of a Basra sports complex. Her husband, an electrician who stayed behind in Kuwait to keep his job, will join them when the border crossing at Safwan reopens for civilian traffic, expected later this week.

“My daughter asked me last night where her bed was,” al-Dujaili said. “I told her we will build a new one. I think she understood that I meant the house too.”

Aid officials said a more detailed regional response plan, including projected funding requirements through the end of the year, would be presented to donors in Geneva next week.