
At last, the longest-ever-awaited news for the people of Gaza. On 19 January a ceasefire was implemented and the war ended. This one at least. Finally, news that means the bloodshed has been brought to a halt. Finally, news that brings with it, to the people hearing it in Gaza, a kind of congratulations: you survived. Only the dead, the lost and the murdered don’t hear it. The dream of each person who died had been to hear this announcement, to bathe in the tone and rhythm of it. Lucky the man or woman who got to hear it. Lucky the child or adult who can start to think of making their way back to the pile of rubble that is their home. Lucky are those who will wake up and be able to look up at the sky, and watch sea birds plucking fish from the sea, without fear of the gunboats and warships firing missiles straight at them. Lucky are those who will return to a new kind of normality, filled with everyday details rather than emergencies and desperation, those who will have time to breathe and think of tomorrow, maybe even the day after.
Finally, they are able to count their hours in “smiles, not tears”. But they will not be able to count their age in “friends, not years” – so many of their friends are gone.
On 16 January, the same day the ceasefire was announced, my best friend Hussain lost his second son. Aqil, a photographer and designer, was killed by an airstrike in Gaza City just three hours before the ceasefire was agreed. Had the negotiators tried harder, worked a bit faster, maybe Aqil would still be with us. His younger brother, Mahmoud, was also killed, two weeks ago.
I talked to Aqil just days ago. As always, he sounded angry, saying, “Those who fight do not care about us.” He was praying for a ceasefire. He wanted to survive. In the last post he wrote on his Facebook account, he said that when the ceasefire is finalised, the first thing he would do is go out and dig a grave for his brother, Mahmoud, and bury him. Now the pair of them are waiting to be buried. “Now they meet in a better place,” their father Hussain tells me on the phone, referring to his two only sons. I repeat an old line: “The world is too much with us.” How savage this war has been, and how cruel. How the world kept silent for 470 long days, watching us being slaughtered, unable to say the very word “genocide”. Now it’s over. Now it’s time for another war to start. For many, the true war starts when the military action ends. The war of grief, of nightmares and flashbacks, of sweat-drenched nights in freezing tents. A war of adjusting to a new reality, a war of rebuilding and remaking Gaza.
All my brothers’ and sisters’ homes were destroyed, as was my father’s. They all try to imagine where they’re going to stay when they return to the North. Undeterred, they repeat a line I’ve heard a hundred times: “We will pitch a tent on the ruins of our house.” The idea of “home” cannot be erased from the Palestinian mind. The Nakba was about losing your home in a national and a personal sense. Now will be about rebuilding it.
Lucky are those who heard the news about the truce. They are the actual winners of the war. The generals lost, along with everyone they killed. But the civilians who escaped the jaws of death – they won. The poor, emaciated, displaced people, starving and shivering in their battered and flooded tents – they won. They are the victors over all the generals, all the politicians and the military leaders. And now they will have a break. They will draw a breath. Even if for just a moment.
But the break will not be easy. The moment they breathe the first thing that will come to mind will be the images, the sounds, the smells, the memories of all those they’ve lost. Over two hundred members of my extended family were lost in this war, including my father Talal, my mother-in-law Widdad, my uncle, my aunt, my cousins, and my niece. The moment a war is over, the death certificates are issued and the mourning begins. Until now we’ve only been able to think of how to survive, minute by minute, day by day. Now is the moment we fully take in who didn’t survive.
It is a time to open the windows of our memory and try to recall the moments we shared with those we’ve lost. A time to visit their graves if they were lucky enough to have one. My father-in-law tells me that the first thing he is going to do is to search for the grave of his wife who passed away last February. He is not sure if the grave is even still there. The Israelis have bulldozed the cemeteries up and down the Strip. In Jabalia, recently buried bodies were unearthed and left lying in the mud.
My wife Hanna asks me if there is any chance some remains of her only sister, her brother-in-law and her nephew, will be found. They have been under the rubble of their house for the last 460 days. I have to invent stories of people who were found perfectly preserved months after their death, in order to keep her from despairing. I cannot bear to tell her otherwise.
Many people in Gaza know this is not a ceasefire but a truce. And rather than dwelling on the first days of the truce, they’re thinking about the last day of it. They will try not to count down the 42 precious days of the first phase, knowing the whole while that on the 43rd day they may wake up in a new war. As my sister Eisha told me: “Let’s think of now. Let’s live in the moment. Today we are OK. Tomorrow is another matter.”
But my brother Ibrahim isn’t so calm. “What about day 43?” he asks. “What if they fail to reach a new deal by then? Are we returning to war at that point?” I try my best to reassure him. I tell him that even if the truce doesn’t last, even if tensions escalate again and the bombing returns, it won’t be like this war. Nothing has ever been, or will ever be, like this war. What we’ve experienced over the last 470 days has now passed. Tomorrow is another matter.
[See also: The left after Trump]