We are a few days into something called a cease-fire. Can we even say that— “a few days into a cease-fire”? For Palestinians in Gaza, the words feel strange on the tongue. Perhaps they are supposed to connote peace, relief, and the chance to take a breath after months of suffocation. Yet I feel none of those things. I don’t even feel that the war has stopped.
By now we should be experts on cease-fires. We’ve lived through many cycles of war and cessation. And yet I don’t know what to feel. “New chapter,” I say to myself. I imagine a director with a clapboard calling, “Scene three!”—but at this point I’ve lost count of the takes.
I’m not alone in this unease. Among my friends and relatives, no one seems to trust this peace. We fear that it will shatter, as the agreements before it have.
Two years of war is a long time. Wounds don’t heal, but fester. Hardly anyone remembers what normal feels like. Technically, the fighting has paused, but we still hear the same sounds, feel the same fear, the same absence of everything familiar. Maybe, my sister-in-law suggested to me, this is why we don’t feel relief or a sense of safety: because we know that whatever comes next will not be a return to the life we had.
Life doesn’t restart—it stumbles forward, uncertain and bruised. At moments like this, I think of an old Arabic saying: “The drunk has sobered, and the thought has come.” During the war, we had no time to think. The only focus was survival, hour by hour, moving from one place to another under bombardment, looking for food, water, medicine, cash, a place to exist. In such circumstances, thoughts, dreams, plans—even grief—collapse into a single instinct.
[Graeme Wood: One era ends in Gaza, and another begins]
With a cease-fire, the thinking returns, and with it, pain. One of my childhood friends, Shaima, was killed in an Israeli air strike along with her three children. So were her two brothers, one of them with his wife and their four children. Shaima and I studied together for eight years. Her family had the only Ping-Pong table in our neighborhood, and she used to try to teach me to play. She was a master. I never learned, but she did teach me to skip rope like a pro. We’d laugh until we fell over.
Days after Shaima was killed, her mother, in Egypt, died grieving. Many Gazans are still searching for missing loved ones whose names appear on no lists. No one knows whether these people are alive, buried under rubble, detained, or dead.
The sky over Gaza may be silent, but Shaima is still gone. A cease-fire is a moment to count the dead.
Gaza’s streets are all rubble. Barely a house stands. The landscape itself feels erased. People say it will take many months just to clear the debris, and longer still to restore water, electricity, even a single functioning road. We’ve lived through this work before—years of halting reconstruction efforts that were never truly completed. But what we face now feels different. We’ve lost schools, hospitals, the streets themselves, the very veins of the city. All of our civil infrastructure has been ground to dust.
Across Gaza, education has been displaced into makeshift tents or broken classrooms, where teachers try to piece together lessons between interruptions. The lack of electricity and stable internet connection make online learning all but impossible. The rhythm of a school day—waking up early, putting on a uniform, hearing the morning bell—has become a memory from another lifetime.
I’ve watched my 20-year-old nephew, named after my father, sink into quiet grief. He was supposed to be in his Tawjihi year, the final stage of high school; he once dreamed of studying engineering. Instead, he has been displaced again and again, carrying his books with him, the one thing he refuses to leave behind. Sometimes he lends them to other students who lost theirs under the rubble. The Ministry of Education attempted to resume exams at one point. He went, more out of habit than hope. How can anyone study when life itself is on hold?
[Read: How Trump pushed Israel and Hamas to yes]
Even health care has been suspended. My 14-year-old niece has been waiting to get braces for nearly a year. Few dentists remain open in Gaza, and the materials for braces are scarce. No one knows whether the necessary parts are still available. We are living in war mode, where fixing a smile or a tooth no longer feels like a priority.
For young people in Gaza, time has stopped. The future hangs suspended in a place without continuity or promise.
People often say here that a cease-fire marks another kind of war—not of weapons, but of suffering. The war of the mind. The war of loss. The war of remembering. The war of reconstruction. A cease-fire means entering a fragile limbo between survival and recovery.
Sometimes during the first cease-fire this past winter, I would catch myself thinking, When the war ends, I will do this. Then I would pause—wasn’t this supposed to be the end?
These days, my mind still whispers, When the war ends—as though the war is continuing inside me, even after the noise of the air strikes outside has stopped.
