WHEN silence falls after the storm, the real story begins. In Gaza, the bombs have gone quiet, but the sound of the rubble is louder than ever. The once lively streets have turned into narrow corridors between crumbling walls, where people walk cautiously, carrying their worries and their dreams.
People are now returning to the scene of the criminal activity of the Zionists and their US-UK backers.
In al-Shati Camp, west of Gaza City, Salah Abu Ghoneima stood before endless destruction. He stared into the void for a long time, trying to draw a map of his old home in his mind.
‘Here was our door … and over there, my mother used to plant mint,’ he said hoarsely, then paused before adding: ‘Now there’s nothing … nothing but rubble.’
For Salah, returning wasn’t to his home, but to the emptiness the war left behind. Still, he picked up his small pickaxe and began clearing what he believed was the house’s courtyard. With a weary smile, he said: ‘Even if nothing remains, I’ll start from here … from this corner.’
The waste of war has left bombs of another kind.
In the displacement areas of southern Gaza, the stench of old smoke mixes with the smell of fresh waste. Heaps of plastic, leftover food, and dead animals surround the tents of the displaced from every side.
Umm Bilal, a mother of five, says she can’t sleep at night out of fear for her children. She said: ‘The insects have become part of our daily life. We close the tent, but they come in through every opening. My youngest got sick three times last month … and we still haven’t seen a doctor.’
The United Nations says Gaza is facing an ‘unprecedented environmental crisis’, with millions of tons of debris and waste piling up. Most streets are blocked, water is mixing with sewage, and hospitals are operating in conditions ‘unfit for human life’.
In the battle after the war, Jaco Cilliers, representative of the UN Development Programme, described the task of cleaning Gaza as ‘harder than reconstruction itself’.
The war didn’t just destroy homes, it crippled everything that makes life possible: Machinery, infrastructure, factories, even green spaces.
‘We’re trying to open the roads first, because an open road is the first step toward life,’ Cilliers said in a press conference in Gaza.
In Khan Younis, a lone bulldozer struggles to carve a path through a sea of rubble. Beside it stands Thaer Al-Astal, a thirty-year-old man wearing a worn-out mask and holding a rusty shovel.
‘We don’t have equipment,’ he says, ‘but we have willpower. Every stone we lift with our hands feels like a step toward life.’
He looks up at the sky and adds: ‘Maybe under the rubble there are bodies or maybe a new beginning. We don’t know but we have to keep going.’
Hope is still rising rising from the dust and the rubble.
Despite everything, children have started drawing on the remaining walls, and houses – suns, flags, and a small repeated phrase: ‘We want to live.’
Those shattered walls have become notebooks of hope, on which Gaza writes its will to survive.
Though every statistic tells a story of catastrophe – over 100,000 buildings destroyed, 300,000 housing units damaged – what cannot be measured is the defiance of life that still beats in people’s hearts.
Hamas leader and chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya has said that repeated remarks by US officials signal the end of the war on the Gaza Strip, stressing that the Israeli occupation has failed miserably to achieve its objectives after two years of conflict.
In an interview conducted with him by Al Jazeera satellite channel on Saturday, al-Hayya affirmed that his Movement would not give the Israeli regime any pretext to resume its genocidal war on Gaza.
Al-Hayya added that the Movement handed over 20 Israeli captives within 72 hours of the ceasefire along with 17 corpses, amid ongoing efforts to locate and recover the remaining bodies in other sites.
Al-Hayya also said that Hamas would hand over ‘all administrative control of the Gaza Strip to an interim committee, including security’. On the issue of disarmament, al-Hayya said that the resistance’s ‘weapons are linked to the existence of occupation and aggression, and if the occupation ends, the weapons will return to the state’.
