On the first day after the guns fell silent, the people of Gaza didn’t know what to do. The war had ended, but peace had not begun. It was as if something inside them was shelling their hearts anew.
Many walked back towards their old neighbourhoods, thinking they were leaving tent life behind. But when they arrived, they found their that homes had been erased and nothing but rubble remained. They wandered through the ruins, their memories broken.
The UN estimates that nearly 80 per cent of Gaza’s structures have been destroyed or damaged since October 2023. Roads are buried under collapsed homes, water has been cut off, electricity has gone, internet access is limited and fuel has become an expensive rarity.
The ceasefire did not bring an end to the war; it marked the beginning of a new challenge of survival. With most homes uninhabitable, infrastructure between neighbourhoods destroyed, the truce fragile and Israel still restricting the entry of goods, life in Gaza remains impossible.
Fatima al-Saadi, 36, returned to the al-Daraj area, east of Gaza City, a month after her last displacement. “I thought going back home would keep me safe,” she tells me when we meet at her tent in the al-Salam camp in Deir al-Balah, a city in the centre of Gaza, “but I came back to nothing: no walls, no door. Only rubble… We couldn’t even feel joy at the end of this war.” In a prayer gown—a garment commonly worn in Gaza—her face looked tired. She often paused, lost in thought, as she answered my questions.
Before the war, Fatima worked as a seamstress, but she lost her sewing machine, which was the family’s only source of income. In al-Daraj, she found a corner of her ruined home with two standing walls and decided to live there, instead of in the tent. She patched the missing walls with sheets of nylon. She tried to clean the place, but there was no water. In devastated areas like this, ensuring a water supply is almost impossible due to the collapse of basic infrastructure.
“This isn’t a return to life,” she says. “It’s a new struggle filled with misery. How can anyone live without water?”
Water trucks cannot reach the area due to the destruction of the roads, and the municipalities have no fuel or bulldozers. “I can’t even wash a plate to cook on or boil a cup of coffee. What end to the war are they talking about?”, she asks.
Khalil al-Sayyed, a 33-year-old who worked as an online programmer for many years, shares the same despair when we speak in the market in Deir al-Balah, where he has a stall. In a blue T-shirt and jeans, he looked thin and his face was burned by the sun, but still had his sense of humour.
“The return itself has become a kind of torment,” he says, staring at the broken street in front of his temporary home in a camp in Deir al-Balah. “I climbed mountains of sand—once streets—just to reach where my house used to be. In the end, I found nothing but rubble.”
He had travelled alone to check on his home in the north. When he returned to the tent he recalls telling his wife and children: “We are homeless now.”
In Gaza, when you come home you face a broader question: How do you start again, when there’s nothing left to start from?
Across the Strip, all aspects of daily life have ground to a halt. Politics remains frozen between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has not released the bodies of Israeli captives, claiming that they remain under the rubble, while Israel threatens further punishment and the resumption of hostilities.
In the meantime the people of Gaza fear that Hamas will insist on remaining in power. In September, at the UN General Assembly in New York, the international community made it clear that Hamas should have no political role in the governance of Gaza. The challenge now is to ensure a smooth transition and the gradual involvement of the Palestinian Authority in the management of Gaza's affairs. A technocratic government composed of independents is to be established, without the direct presence of any of the Palestinian factions.
If Hamas obstructs, rejects or stalls this process, Gaza will remain trapped in a vicious cycle, delaying reconstruction efforts and perpetuating the war in various forms.
The shooting may have stopped, but Gazans are now fighting other wars, from the absence of homes, infrastructure collapse and economic paralysis to societal and security breakdowns that could lead to further internal violence and civil strife.
There has been no electricity since the early days of the assault in October 2023, when Israel destroyed the main power station and blocked the entry of fuel. Most solar panels were also struck down during the bombings.
“We used to rely on solar energy for work and lighting,” says Khalil. “Now, we can barely charge a phone. It’s a miserable life. The war still haunts us, even without the bombing.”
Most who once made their living online have lost their jobs, including Khalil, who worked as a freelance programmer for international companies. “It’s as if we’ve gone back to the Stone Age,” he says. “Everything has stopped here.” Now, he sells tinned food, pulses and cleaning supplies in the market, to earn a little money to support his family amid soaring living costs.
For two years, most Gazans have had no income. Currency is scarce, markets have been destroyed and crossings are sealed, leaving the majority below the poverty line. Even after the ceasefire, nothing has changed because reconstruction and imports remain hostage to political bargaining.
Fuel on the black market sells for around $20 a litre, and moving furniture from one camp to another can cost up to $300—a fortune that few can afford. Drivers exploit the situation, unchecked by any rule of law.
I meet Waheed al-Masri, 34, a displaced teacher living in a damaged school in western Gaza, on my travels from Deir al-Balah to my own devastated neighbourhood in the north, where I hoped to see what remained of my home. “We dream of going home. But how? Even the road back costs money, and we have none,” he tells me.
When he returned to his old neighbourhood, Tel al-Hawa in Gaza City, Waheed found that his house was still standing. However, he couldn’t afford to move his family or even the furniture from the tent back home.
“Two years of war left me broken,” he says. “I thought things would improve after the ceasefire, but nothing has changed. We’re suspended between life and death.”
Gaza City lies pale, scorched and silent. Markets that once pulsed with noise are suffocatingly still. There is no meat, no eggs, no clothes, no factories. Gaza is trapped in a life that barely resembles one at all.
“The city has died economically,” says Khalil , sitting in soiled clothes. “We can't afford basic things anymore—food, clothes, sweets.” With quiet resignation, he adds, “I used to care about my appearance. Now I don’t. My clothes get dirty and I don’t bother cleaning them. Even if I had money, the remaining shops only sell old, damaged clothes that have been pulled from under the rubble and are faded or soaked by rain. Life has forced us into this disaster, even after the war stopped.”
Two years without schools. Desks are shattered, teachers are displaced and students are disconnected from the curriculum and their future. Waheed speaks softly. “My passion is broken,” he says. “I don’t know how to see the road ahead anymore.”
Waheed tries to teach children in the camp. He used to use a wooden board for his lessons, writing letters on it, but someone stole it to use as firewood for a cooking stove.
“It hurts,” he says, “to see children queuing at soup kitchens or water trucks, carrying loads bigger than themselves and bearing pain that should never be theirs.”
It has been two years since Gaza’s children last sat in a classroom. Their lives froze on 7th October. Now, they roam the streets, forced to work and shoulder family burdens.
“How can education resume with no schools, no internet, no notebooks and no books?” Waheed asks. “Most schools have been destroyed, and the few that remain house displaced families. Children who should be in class now live on the streets. A dark future awaits them.”
Fatima laughs bitterly. “My son Saeed has forgotten everything he learnt in the first year of school. He can’t read anymore. I feel helpless and angry. He’s been set back so much in his education, and I don’t know how to save him from becoming ignorant.”
It is said that more than 10,000 bodies remain unrecovered beneath the rubble. The heat accelerates decay, and foul smells seep through the neighbourhoods, an unspoken warning of an impending plague.
“When I approach my house,” says Fatima, “the stench is unbearable, it’s the smell of death. Under the rubble of the house next to ours lie nine bodies, among them my friend and neighbour. Every day, I look out of my broken window towards the place where we once laughed and shared our lives. Even after the war, she never received a proper burial.”
Rescue teams lack equipment, as most of it was bombed, and heavy machinery is barred from entering Gaza. Israel is deliberately preventing this, keeping in its hands a subtle weapon to strike at what remains of Hamas’s structure in Gaza. As part of the first phase of Trump’s peace plan, there are obligations on Hamas that Israel claims have not yet been fulfilled—namely, the complete handover of the bodies of Israeli hostages. So far, 15 out of 28 bodies have been returned; Hamas argues that the remaining bodies are difficult to locate because they are buried under the rubble of buildings and tunnels, but repeatedly says it is working on the matter.
All over Gaza, people dig with their hands, terrified of what they might find. “Under every stone,” said Waheed, “there’s a chance you’ll find someone you knew. No one wants to lift the rubble. We’re being left to die, and even the dignity of burying our dead is being denied to us.”
Even since the war stopped, the nights are not quiet. Gunfire echoes again, this time from public executions carried out by Hamas against those accused of collaboration or aid theft.
“I saw two young men executed in front of everyone,” say Waheed. “I couldn’t sleep afterwards. The war ended, but the terror has just changed shape.”
Khalil, who lost a friend who was accused of treason, added: “Fear has become universal. Anyone could be next, just for speaking freely.”
“They kill them in front of their children. This isn’t justice. This is another war, just without planes,” says Fatima, adding, “There must be fair trials and proper courts, not this brutality.”
Gaza’s crossings remain closed. Israel only allows 300 trucks in daily, despite the Strip needing 1,000, and the agreement under the ceasefire deal being 600 a day. No patients are allowed out. More than 45,000 wounded and ill people are awaiting permits for treatment.
Humanitarian groups can barely enter, and hospitals are almost out of medicine. “My brother has a spinal injury,” says Fatima. “No treatment, no travel. He’s just waiting for death, like everyone else.”
Everything revolves around the politics of the crossings. Israel links reconstruction and aid to the return of captive bodies. In this cruel equation, civilians are the only losers.
As a result of this brutality, Gaza City has become formless and unfit for life. With no signs of reconstruction and no clear plans to restore services, and with politics moving at a snail’s pace, the suffering of its residents is prolonged every day.
Each evening, Waheed sits on the broken steps of the school, writing in his notebook, wondering, “Where has life gone?” Khalil, staring into the dark horizon, says quietly, “I’ve lost everything. I feel like I’m being led to an unknown death.”
And Fatima tries to create a small oasis of normality amid the chaos, nonetheless. She planted mint in an old milk can, just to prove that something can grow.