Gaza ceasefire: How I survived Israel's genocidal war
I had come to terms with the idea that I might never reach this moment - writing an end-of-war article.
When I grabbed this laptop, one of the few things I managed to take with me while evacuating my home in Gaza City on 13 October 2023, I knew it would be used to document - but at the time, I did not contemplate the end of this war.
Yet here I am. I have managed to survive, along with some of my fellow journalists, who endured a war that seemed intent on .
But survival has come at a cost. The meanings of life and death have shifted forever.
Over the past 15 months, I have been forcibly displaced across three shelters in the central and southern Gaza Strip. The farthest was about a 40-minute drive from my home. Throughout this time, death has felt closer than the home I left behind.
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The possibility of death grew more tangible with each report documenting violations by the Israeli army, and with every journalist colleague killed. For the first time, staying alive became less about survival, and more about racing against time to document as many stories as possible before meeting the same fate.
It was a race with no clear finish line - where the value of time was no longer measured in hours, but in stories captured, lives witnessed, and voiceless victims finally being heard. An immense responsibility fell upon all local Palestinian journalists the moment Israel decided to bar international correspondents from entering Gaza.
Forced isolation
With Israel’s constant blackouts, which lasted for months in Gaza, each moment of darkness and forced isolation felt like an attempt to silence journalists.
It was through small victories that we managed to keep hope alive: every text message sent, every report pushed through, even after hours spent on rooftops or walking the streets in search of an elusive eSIM signal, felt like a quiet triumph.
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While in shelter, I found things taking on an entirely new significance, such as when we finally managed to power up the TV for the first time in months, thanks to solar panels. A news conference was discussing the ongoing violations in Gaza and the daily slaughter of civilians.
Normally, I would have been absorbed in the gravity of the speech, the calls for justice and human rights. But this time, it was not the message that grabbed me, but rather the speaker’s immaculate suit, the pristine glass of water before him, and the bottle of juice at his side. In that moment, all I could think of were the long queues to fill a water bottle, the forgotten luxury of bottled juice, and the rare experience of a proper shower.
This week, a long-awaited ceasefire deal was finally announced for Gaza. It is set to take effect on Sunday.
I was at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah on Wednesday when the agreement was announced. I chose to witness this moment from a place that has been etched into my memory as a site of both survival and loss.
It was there that I conducted dozens of interviews and gathered testimonies from Palestinians who had been targeted, as well as from those who had sought shelter inside the hospital to escape Israeli attacks.
Like almost all hospitals across the blockaded enclave, this one stands as a witness to the atrocities committed against civilians, and was itself the site of a massacre, as the Israeli army targeted and burned alive displaced civilians in makeshift tents in its courtyard.
The quest for return
Shortly before and after the ceasefire announcement, I spoke with nine Palestinians inside the hospital, including displaced people, journalists and patients. I asked about the first thing they wanted to do when the ceasefire took effect. Their answer was unanimous and poignant: to return home to northern Gaza.
To an outsider, this answer might seem typical, even predictable. But for someone who has lived among these displaced people - and been one of them for more than 15 months - it is mind-blowing.
Those of us displaced since the beginning of the war have watched closely Israel’s treatment of those who remained in northern Gaza.
Israel has relentlessly pursued its goal of emptying Gaza of its residents through forced displacement orders, starvation, mass killings and field executions of those who refused to leave. Even in “humanitarian zones” that were supposed to be safe, attacks and massacres continued, alongside the relentless violence in northern Gaza.
Complying with Israeli evacuation orders never felt like a safe option. For Palestinians across Gaza, the reality has always been that they could be targeted at any moment.
Two days before the ceasefire was announced, as Palestinians held their breath, a donkey-drawn cart driver passed by me in one of Deir al-Balah’s most crowded neighbourhoods.
“To Shujaiya, Rimal, Tal al-Hawa!” he called out, naming Gaza City neighbourhoods from which we were forcibly displaced more than a year ago. He shouted as if he was about to take people there, a common behaviour that has emerged among the displaced in Gaza over the past year.
I smiled as my fingers unconsciously reached into my bag, finding the keys to my home in Gaza City whose door was blown apart by the Israeli army. These keys have always stayed with me - a small, subconscious way of tricking myself into believing I may need them again someday.
Perhaps that’s why I find it so mind-blowing that, even in the face of an internationally recognised genocide, Palestinians in Gaza have clung to the idea of return - because after 15 months of unrelenting terror, bombings, starvation and obliteration, with homes reduced to rubble and entire communities annihilated, the prayer to return home has always come before the prayer to survive.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.