GAZA, (PIC)
The Palestinians, who have endured the horrors of the Israeli genocide for more than 15 months, do not hide their overwhelming joy at its cessation, a war that has taken many loved ones from them, erased entire families from the civil registry, displaced hundreds of thousands, starved and thirsted them, forcing them to live in a true “hell.”
According to the latest official data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 47,283 Palestinians were martyred during the genocide in the Gaza Strip, with hundreds of thousands injured, causing wide-scale destruction, and over 14,000 Palestinians still missing.
Since the first day the ceasefire agreement came into effect, families displaced by the Israeli crimes have begun to return to their homes in the central region and Rafah governorate. Their joy was palpable as they gradually approached their neighborhoods, which were no longer as they once were. The destruction was all-encompassing, making it difficult to recognize places. Those fortunate enough to have a small part of their homes still “standing” could sit and live inside, despite the absence of all human life necessities in the areas where the occupation carried out its criminal operations.
Conflicting and mixed feelings
Um Al-Mu’tasim returned to her home, large parts of which had been destroyed, in the New Camp area north of Al-Nuseirat Camp, following a bombing that targeted her family’s home in July 2024, leading to a major massacre that not only crushed the house but also erased memories and an entire life.
In this bombing, Um Al-Mu’tasim lost her son, the journalist Mu’tasim, her second son Mu’adh, his wife, and their daughter, while her only surviving son, Yazan, miraculously escaped the bombardment.
Um Al-Mu’tasim lives with conflicting feelings; she was overjoyed at the end of the war and returning to her home despite its condition. However, she sees the specter of her martyred sons and grandchildren in every corner, imagining them entering her room at any moment throughout her difficult days.
“In every corner, there are memories and moments; I can do nothing but pray for them. I am happy that people have escaped the grinding mill of the harsh war, but I cannot overcome the grief of losing my sons and grandchildren. Their specter haunts me every moment, and I remember the moment I pulled them from under the rubble as martyrs. I choke hundreds of times a day,” says Um Al-Mu’tasim.
On the first day of the ceasefire, Um Al-Mu’tasim entered her son Mu’adh’s house for the first time after a long displacement journey, accompanied by the only survivor from her family, the child Yazan. She couldn’t hold back her tears as she recalled his kind heart, tenderness, and his aspirations for a better life for his small family.
Um Al-Mu’tasim tries to appear strong in front of her two grandsons, Mahmoud and Muhammad, from her son Mu’tasim, and her grandson Yazan from her martyred son Mu’adh, but sometimes she fails, crying bitterly and deeply missing them. She says, “I didn’t know the true meaning of longing and its pains until after losing Mu’tasim and Mu’adh. This longing cannot heal from its pains, no matter how much time passes.”
Um Al-Mu’tasim has not forgotten to affirm that she considers her sons martyrs in the path of Allah, like many of their people who left this world during the criminal war on the Gaza Strip, indicating that feelings of loss and its pains cannot be interpreted as weakness or retreat.
Feeling of victory
And the reader should not think that the conflicting emotions experienced by Palestinians in Gaza following the ceasefire reflect a spirit of defeat or brokenness; rather, they are natural human feelings.
What one observes regarding the conditions of people in Gaza, despite their immense pain, severe material losses, and the overwhelming sorrow of loss, is that they have not broken or turned against their convictions regarding the necessity of resistance as a means to achieve their dreams of liberating their land and purifying their sanctities.
They firmly believe they have not been broken by the occupation, which they see as having lost and been defeated against their will and the resilience of their resistance, as the occupation has not achieved its declared objectives.
This is not a fleeting statement; recent journalistic and international reports have confirmed this Palestinian feeling of victory and resilience in the face of the defeat that the occupation has suffered.
In one of its analytical articles, the British website Middle East Eye stated that the occupation has destroyed life in Gaza, but it is far from victory, emphasizing that the occupation’s weaknesses revealed by the Al-Aqsa Flood attack on October 7 have intensified.
The site highlighted that after 15 months of continuous bombardment that caused unprecedented death and destruction in Gaza, analysts agree that the occupying state is far from achieving victory, stating, “Despite its overwhelming firepower and international support, it has failed to achieve many of its primary war objectives.”
Last Sunday, a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement began between the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas and Israel, which will last for the first phase of 42 days, during which negotiations for a second and then a third phase will take place, aiming for a complete cessation of war and the withdrawal of the occupation army from the Gaza Strip entirely.
