It’s been a week since a ceasefire was proclaimed in Gaza. For the first time in 15 months, the relentless sound of the explosion was replaced by silence. But that silence is not peace. It is a silence that screams loss, destruction and sadness – a pause in destruction, not the end. He feels like he is standing in the middle of the ash of the house, looking for something, anything that survived.
The pictures that come from gauze are persecuted. Children with hollow eyes stand in the ruins of what was once their home. Parents are sticking to toys, photographs and clothing – fragments of life that no longer exists. Every face speaks of trauma and survival, interrupted and torn about life. I can hardly be brought to a look, but I force myself because I feel like I feel like I’m leaving them. They deserve to be seen.
When I called my mother after the interruption of the fire was announced, the first thing she told me was, “We can grieve now.” These words broke through me like a blade. There has been no room for sadness for months. The fear of immediate death consumed every awake moment, leaving no room for sorrow. How do you grieve for what you lost when you fight for survival? But now, as the bombs stop falling, sadness comes to a hurry like flood, irresistible and relentless.
More than 47,000 people – men, women and children – are dead. Forty -seven thousand souls extinguished, their lives were stolen in unimaginable ways. More than 100,000 were injured, many are maiden for life. Behind these numbers are faces, dreams and families that will never be whole again. The extent of the loss is so huge that it cannot be understood, but in Gaza sadness is never abstract. It is personal, it is raw and it is everywhere.
People in Gaza grieve loved ones, and they grieve their homes as well. The loss of the home is greater than the loss of physical structure. My friend in Gaza, who also lost his home, told me, “Home is like your child. It takes years to build, and you care about it, you always want it to look best.”
In gauze, people often build their homes from brick, sometimes with their own hands. Losing your home means loss of security, comfort, a place where love is shared and creating memories. The home is not just bricks and mortar; This is where life is going on. Losing it means to lose a piece of yourself, and in Gazi, countless families lost that piece over and over.
The house of my parents, a house that sheltered childhood memories, is gone. Burned on the ground, now there is a bunch of ash and twisted metal. Six homes of my brothers and sisters were also destroyed, their lives rooted and scattered like debris of their walls. What remains are the stories we talk to survive – perhaps stories of resilience, endurance, hope, maybe. But even they feel fragile now.
For those of us outside Gaza, sadness is complex with guilt. The guilt for not being there because they do not tolerate the same terror as our loved ones, for life of relative security while they suffer. It is an unbearable tension – to be strong, but to feel extremely helpless. I try to stick to the idea of my voice, my words, I can make a difference, but even it feels inadequate from the size of their pain.
My family’s story about loss is just one of tens of thousands. The entire fourth were deleted, the communities turned into dust. The extent of destruction is beyond understanding. Schools, hospitals, mosques and homes – everything is reduced to ruins. Gaza was taken away from her infrastructure, her economy broke down, and people traumatized. And yet, somehow, they endure.
The resistance of the Palestinian people is both inspiring and cardiac. Inspiring because they continue to survive, renew, dream of a better future despite the chances. Heartily because no one should be so resistant. No one should endure this level of suffering just to exist.
But even when we feel relief now, we know that any interruption of fire is temporarily, according to the default settings. How can this be anything else when the fundamental cause of this devastation remains – interest? As long as the gauze is blocked, as long as the Palestinians deny their freedom and dignity, as long as their country is occupied, and as long as Israel supports the West that it acts with unpunished, the cycle of violence will continue.
Error are not solutions; They are just interruptions, they stop, the current refund in the cycle of violence that has defined the reality of gauze for too long. Without resolving the fundamental injustice, they were doomed to failure, leaving Gaza trapped in endless loops of destruction and despair.
True peace requires more than the end of the bombing. This requires the end of the blockage, the occupation, the systemic oppression that has made life in Gaza unbearable.
The international community cannot look away now that the bombs have stopped falling. They must consider Israel responsible for their actions. The work of the gauze renewal is important, but working on resolving the fundamental causes of this conflict is more urgent. Requires political courage, moral clarity and unwavering commitment to justice. There are fewer and fewer betrayal of the people of Gaza.
For my family, the path is long before us. It will be renewed, as always. They will find a way to create a new sense of the house in the middle of the ruins. But the scars of this genocide will never fade. My mother’s words – “now we can grieve” – will echo forever, a reminder of the huge human costs of this conflict.
As I write this, I am overwhelmed with a mixture of emotions: anger, sadness and glitter of hope. Anger in the world for allowing such crimes to take place, sadness of lost lives and homes destroyed and I hope that one day my people will know peace. Until then, we mourn. We grieve for the dead, for the living, for the life we once knew and the life we still dream of.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.
