I was living in a tent on the beach in central Gaza when news of the ceasefire reached me. It was October 2025, and I was displaced with my children for the seventh time, exhausted and depleted. Instead of relief, I felt double the pain. The truce had come too late, after the genocide had consumed everything I owned. The night before the agreement, my house was demolished by a violent bomb that leveled part of our neighborhood. There was nothing left to return to. Gaza City was unrecognizable, its streets and squares disfigured, the surviving apartment buildings turned into commodities rented out at exorbitant prices. For days, I hesitated. Then a friend who had fled to Egypt during the war offered to rent us her flat. We packed our belongings and made the trek back to what remained of our city.
After months of starvation, it was hard for my soul to reconcile itself to the sight of food. In stores newly stocked with goods, my eyes would linger on a piece of fruit, and I would be overcome with grief remembering how my children cried for bananas and apples at the height of the siege. Every time I smelled freshly baked bread, my memory flooded with images of people killed by Israeli fire as they tried to acquire a bag of flour at the gates of the American food distribution points. Bread, once a symbol of abundance and life, had become inseparable from death.
Today, the starvation appears to have ended, but only superficially. The occupation continues its campaign in more insidious ways, permitting the entry of high-calorie items with no nutritional value while banning or restricting what the body needs to heal. The souks are full of chocolates and biscuits and soft drinks, all sold at double the normal price, while meat and eggs are scarce or impossibly expensive for people who lost everything, including their incomes. Is the occupation trying to fatten people up to obscure the effects of the famine it engineered? Or is the starvation ongoing but in a new guise?
The health care system tells the same story. During the genocide, hospitals in Gaza lost most of their capacity — equipment destroyed, wards flattened, doctors and nurses killed, imprisoned, or displaced. To this day, Israel bars the entry of critical medical supplies, including modern diagnostic devices, essential medications, and effective treatments for the injured. What arrives instead are simple analgesics that do little to alleviate pain.
In August, my husband, Ahmad, began to suffer from kidney stones, a common condition in Gaza, where people have spent two years drinking polluted water and eating high-sodium canned foods. At first, the pain was manageable, but after we returned to Gaza City, it worsened to the point where he couldn’t walk to the end of the street. A CT scan revealed multiple stones, one the size of a garbanzo bean, blocking the opening of the kidney.
The occupation continues its campaign in more insidious ways
Elsewhere, this would be a routine case, but in Gaza, medications to help pass kidney stones are unavailable, and machines to carry out noninvasive laser treatment were destroyed in the war. His only option is open-kidney surgery, typically reserved for serious conditions like cancer. The operation costs around $2,500 and isn’t guaranteed to work — without surgical imaging tools, the doctor said, he would effectively be going in blind.
The pain that Ahmad lives with is small compared to that of thousands of other patients across Gaza, people who lost limbs in the war or suffer from cancer or renal failure. Hospitals lack sufficient capacity to intake the enormous number of wounded. Many critical cases require urgent transfer to hospitals outside Gaza, but the Rafah border crossing is closed, making access to treatment abroad a fantasy. The only remaining option is medical evacuation via Ramon Airport, a highly complex process subject to lengthy approvals and bureaucratic procedures that can take months. Some families only receive approval after their children have died.
Even for those not interfacing with the medical system, the aftermath of the war imposes its own slow violence. After the announcement of the ceasefire, people began to reckon with the reality that many of their loved ones had perished beneath the rubble and were without graves. Others had disappeared without a trace. Were they martyrs? Prisoners? Alive somewhere unknown? While the world focused on the identities of Israeli captives, Palestinians searched through decomposed remains for traces of their children.
I think often of my sister. On October 12, 2023, the sixth day of the genocide, we moved to my sister-in-law’s house, believing it might be safer there. We had just endured five nights of ceaseless bombing. The neighborhood of Al-Karameh had burned before our eyes. There was no electricity or internet, only radio broadcasts that transmitted fragments of news. At around six in the evening, we heard that a house in my sister’s area had been bombed. I called her, then called again. I called her husband. I felt it. By ten that night, we learned that she had been killed.
I went to Al-Shifa Hospital, desperate to see her. Don’t ask me why, but until you see the body of a martyr, you don’t believe that they’re really gone. But she wasn’t there. Her husband, injured himself, told me, “Your sister is a martyr.” He lost eight members of his family in that strike.
Perhaps the hardest consequence of the October 2025 “ceasefire” is this suspended existence, the sense that one cannot make a single life decision
Her body never arrived at the hospital. Her name never appeared in the freezer. To this day, nothing. Later, I learned that Israel had removed rubble from her neighborhood to construct a port in Netzarim. I couldn’t stop thinking of that rubble, of how my sister may have been carried away with it. Eventually, her name appeared on a list published by the Ministry of Health — a number. No grave. No burial. Nothing left but memory.
After a two-year hiatus, I recently returned to the elementary school where I used to teach. Like the rest of Gaza’s schools, it had been transformed during the war into a temporary shelter housing thousands of displaced people. Among the most painful sights I beheld in those days were the occupation’s tanks stationed around its perimeter. Classrooms echoed with the sounds of drones and gunfire, and mattresses lined the walls. The courtyard became a graveyard. Blackboards bore names of the dead.
Now I return again, not to resume education as it was but to start from nothing, building classrooms from worn-out tents and tarpaulins held up by wooden poles. There are no more blackboards, no desks. The children I teach can’t believe they’re back in school. Their faces bear the marks of hunger and accumulated trauma. It’s a scene that takes us back to the beginnings of education a century ago, but this time surrounded by the wreckage of modern war.
Perhaps the hardest consequence of the October 2025 “ceasefire” is this suspended existence, the sense that one cannot make a single life decision due to the harshness of their reality. Families were not given alternative homes after theirs were destroyed, and no real reconstruction process has begun. Some who did manage to return home were subsequently forced out by the Israeli military, which keeps shifting the “yellow line” that demarcates its new occupation of Gaza to absorb more and more Palestinian land. Daily bombing raids and drone strikes — in violation of the ceasefire agreement — echo across the Strip. Tens of thousands remain in tents, lacking the most basic necessities.
A tent, as I learned during my own displacement, is not a temporary shelter. It is the experience of your life being swept from under your feet and thrown into the open; it is insecurity in all its forms. We pitch tents on the pavement, by the sea, or near the sewer. Everything is vulnerable: your privacy, your sleep, your needs, even your children. At any moment, the tent can be cut open by a passing knife, and what little you have left can be stolen, not to mention that you have to coexist with the land’s original inhabitants — reptiles, rodents, insects, and dogs — as well as the diseases these creatures carry, diseases forgotten by humankind.
Many have begun to consider voluntary emigration as a way to escape this hell. But the border crossings remain closed, and most of the world’s countries refuse to receive refugees from Gaza. The only exits are narrow and conditional: a medical evacuation, an academic scholarship, a temporary tourist visa. Egypt grants Palestinians from Gaza entry for 40 days, after which they are left without residency or legal status, forced to search for another country that might accept them.
Some have attempted to secure work permits in the Sultanate of Oman, but these documents are time limited, and jobs are scarce. Others move from Oman to Turkey, and from there risk the sea-crossing to Greece in small dinghies, swimming toward shore, enduring detention, and only then applying for refugee status in Europe. It is a dangerous, exhausting gamble, undertaken simply to gain the right to live somewhere after one’s city has been destroyed.
Personally, I have always chosen to remain in Gaza, convinced that this is my homeland and that it is my duty to stay and contribute to its reconstruction. Even during the war, I rejected the idea of leaving, believing that to remain in the land is itself an act of resistance. But as time passed, and with everything I saw and experienced during the stages of the genocide, that faith began to crumble. The event that we so longed for, a ceasefire, brought no safety and guaranteed no future, neither for me nor for my children. We remain besieged, not only by barbed wire and rubble but also by uncertainty and a lack of options. Under a truce without a horizon, reconstruction without a plan, and “peace” without justice, Gaza continues its silent resistance, accumulating deferred grief, awaiting a true dawn.
Nour Abdel Latif is a writer and middle school English teacher from Gaza City.
Photos courtesy of Nour Abdel Latif.
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