By Fawaz Turki
For the people of Gaza, today is a day of days. The murderousness and caprice of the inhuman that they had been subjected to daily over the last 470 consecutive days of war will cease – at least for now. Just for now indeed.
You would have to be an outright optimist or gifted with self-deception to harbour the illusion that by finally agreeing to a ceasefire on Wednesday – one it came a hair short of renouncing on Thursday – Israel intends to terminate its war of annihilation on the people inhabiting this little, tormented strip of land. In Gaza, only the dead – including the thousands amongst them uncounted under the rubble or in makeshift graves – have seen the end of war.
The living will still need to contend with the Zionist state's unending grievance against them, namely that they continue to exist as Palestinians – a gripe the Zionist state has held since it grafted itself on Palestine close to eight decades ago.
But a ceasefire is a ceasefire and it was welcomed by people of Gaza, virtually all of whom have been maimed in body and spirit by immeasurable pain at losing loved ones. And there they were on Tuesday, in spontaneous outbursts of joy and even public displays of affection, they expressed an overwhelming sense of relief in their rubble strewn streets. Yet, this relief and jubilation were mixed with a sombre awareness that the deal they were celebrating was fragile in the extreme.
Yes, true, the ceasefire was welcomed by Palestinians, as it was by their supporters around the world, though they knew this was not about to become a ceasefire similar, say, to the one observed on the Western Front on November 24, 1914, when French, British and German soldiers celebrated throughout the week leading up to Christmas, exchanging seasonal greetings and songs between the trenches. They knew it could not be anything resembling that. Not by a stretch.
On Wednesday, a day after the signing of the agreement, and three before its implementation on the ground, Israel's military unleashed horrific strikes on central and northern Gaza that resulted in the gratuitous slaughter of 123 people, including 33 children and 33 women, and the injury of more than 270 others.
This, indubitably, pointed to a potential sub-humanity latent in the archetype of the Zionist state. For how else to explain such a vindictive bent of mind?
Fragile truce
Thus, our weariness that a ceasefire will last and that it will survive through its third phase, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the enclave, is not altogether unjustified, given two hard-nosed facts about it.
The ceasefire agreement reportedly was so ambiguously worded and its terms so loosely framed by mediators anxious to finalise a deal that it could come unstuck with impressive ease.
And then there's the unstable, erratic and unpredictable ruling coalition government in Israel, whose prime minister's jugular is grabbed by what is universally agreed are nutty, messianic and hardcore right wing extremists whose actions have unmasked the deep schisms in Israeli society and the vagaries of Israeli politics in our time.
It goes without saying that these folks will, so long as they remain part of this coalition, pose a threat to the longevity of the ceasefire agreement throughout its three phases, each fraught with uncertainty.
The first phase – the exchange of prisoners – is the easy, logical part. Then comes the improbable, illogical second phase that sees Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza (while keeping a truce line on the northern border and another along the Philadelphia Corridor in the south) and allowing hundreds of thousands of Gazans to "return to their homes."
Say what now? Gazans returning to their homes? What homes?
There are no homes left standing in Gaza— now a wasteland whose desolation evokes not only Dresden in modern history but also Carthage, levelled to the ground by Roman legions in 146 BCE, and Baghdad, sacked by Mongolian hordes in 1258.
Staggering devastation
The devastation, as assessed by the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT), is staggering: roughly 257,800 homes ("housing units") destroyed in Gaza, leaving around 95 percent of the enclave's pre-war population of 2.3 million people displaced -- not including the deliberate destruction of mosques, schools, shops, community centres and the like, as well as the deliberate detonation of public buildings, such as universities and infrastructure sites.
To put it in perspective, if the debris were piled into 11 monstrous heaps, each would rival the size of the Great Giza Pyramid in Egypt. Or, estimated another way, three times as many buildings have been destroyed in Gaza as there are in Manhattan Island in New York.
And then there’s the rubble itself. Disposing of this immense quantity of debris in an enclave as tiny as Gaza – much of it will have to be carted off outside the Strip's borders, an effort estimated to take 14 years – before Palestinians can begin rebuilding, which is envisioned in the third phase of the agreement.
Last week, as a soon-to-be former secretary of state, Antony Blinken gave a speech – one he used to manicure his legacy as an enabler of Israel's mayhem in Gaza – to an audience at the Atlantic Council in which he spoke glibly about the "rebuilding" and "governance" of the Strip, imbuing its future with moral optimism. Damn the man.
What hope remains?
Is this fragile truce the beginning of the end of Gaza’s suffering? Sadly, the answer appears to be no.
Reuters
For the ceasefire to hold, the root causes of the war must be addressed and resolved to break the cycle of violence (Reuters/Mahmoud Issa).
Somewhere in Gaza today, a day when it is hoped the missiles and the 2000-pound bombs will stop falling on the heads of any more innocent civilians, there is an unaccompanied child (of whom there are thousands) saying to himself: "I am still hungry. I am still alone. I am still unsafe. I am still cold."
Without addressing the systemic oppression, economic blockade, and political stalemate that define life in Gaza, this ceasefire risks becoming just another pause in an unending cycle of violence.
For this ceasefire to truly signal the beginning of the end for Gaza’s anguish, bold actions must follow. The blockades must be lifted. War crimes must be accounted for. And the root causes of this decades-long conflict—occupation, displacement, and the denial of Palestinian statehood—must be addressed. Anything less will leave Gaza trapped in perpetual devastation.
The author, Fawaz Turki, was born in Haifa in 1940, fled with his family to Lebanon following the 1948 Nakba and is now a Palestinian-American journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington, DC. His publications include the autobiography The Disinherited: Journey of Palestinian Exile (1972), Soul in Exile (New York, 1988) and Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American (New York, 1995).
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT Afrika.
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