What Gaza’s ceasefire means for my surviving family

Israel’s genocide killed many of my relatives, but those who lived to see the ceasefire are determined to rebuild Palestine from the rubble.

22 January 2025
An aerial photograph taken by a drone shows displaced Palestinians returning to Rafah, a day after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into effect, Gaza Strip, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.

Displaced Palestinians return to Rafah a day after the ceasefire started. (Photo: Mohammad Abu Samra via Alamy)

After 15 months of the Biden administration arming Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, President Trump got what he demanded: a ceasefire exactly a day before his inauguration.

The Israeli government, backed by much of the public, did everything possible for the ceasefire not to pass. 

The far-right escalated settler violence throughout the occupied West Bank, while the military found disturbing new ways to dehumanise Gaza’s residents – risking their own hostages’ lives in the process. 

Nonetheless, a long awaited ceasefire was finally reached, virtually the same deal that was on the table in May 2024.

The ceasefire was announced three days before going into effect on 19 January, ending a genocidal war which left Gaza in ruins. Ten percent of our people have been killed, maimed or disappeared. 

The Lancet medical journal suggests the real death toll could be 40% higher than the 47,000 recorded by Gaza’s health ministry, due to Israel’s persistent destruction of health and telecommunication infrastructure.

Even during the three-hour delay Israel imposed to the ceasefire on Sunday, the Israeli army killed at least 19 people in Gaza – on top of the 123 Palestinians who were killed since the announcement – terrorising people until the very end. 

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Burying the dead

If Palestinians’ cries for an end to the genocide were taken seriously, thousands of Palestinian and Arab lives could have been spared. 

Those include my uncle Marwan and aunt Haniyya, their son Wasim and nephew Ismail who were killed two weeks before the ceasefire, on 2 January 2025, forcing my family to welcome the new year with a funeral. 

Over a hundred mutilated bodies have been recovered since the withdrawal of Israeli forces from besieged areas in Gaza as rescue teams search for over 10,000 missing people.

My paternal aunt Soad was praying that her son Mohammed Ata Abusalama, who had been missing for a fortnight, was not among the dead. But she returned on Sunday to find his bones amongst the debris. 

Despite Mohammed joining our family’s martyrs on the day of the ceasefire, I am relieved that we no longer have to guess whether loved ones will live or die another day. 

I could not be prouder of my surviving family who returned to the rubble of their own homes, determined to rebuild, defeating “the Generals’ Plan” that fantasised over emptying and annexing northern Gaza. 

What remains of our Al-Saftawi neighborhood on Sunday 19 January, with my family’s home among the rubble. (Photo: Supplied)

A temporary truce?

This genocidal offensive has been the longest in Israel’s history, which Zionists claim as the “second war of independence” since the 1947-8 ethnic cleansing of Palestine when the state of Israel was founded.

That turned Gaza into a mass concentration camp for dispossessed refugees, who comprise more than 70% of its population. 

Those 1948 refugees, like my family in Jabalia refugee camp, experienced the past 15 months of torture and loss as merely another chapter in Palestine’s ongoing Nakba (catastrophe). 

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the ceasefire deal as “temporary” in a public address to his nation.

He reassured them that Biden and Trump backed Israel’s so-called “right to return to the fighting” after the first phase of truce, which will see the release of 33 Israeli hostages. 

Shooting the messenger

For 471 days Israel targeted Palestinian media workers and their families, leaving me consumed by worry about my cousins Abood and Mahmoud Abusalama.

They are frontline journalists in northern Gaza and survived near death encounters various times, yet generated a record of crimes yearning for accountability. 

I followed them day after day as they tirelessly documented Israel’s mass atrocities and the struggles of displaced Palestinians. 

I spotted them in photos putting their cameras aside to save the wounded or excavate the massacred. 

Mahmoud and Abood did all this while displaced, starved and bereaved themselves – and now continue to cover the unfolding realities of the ceasefire. 

I saw Mahmoud overcome by tears of relief as he reported for the first time “from the heart of Jabalia refugee camp” after three months of displacement and siege that witnessed one of the ugliest campaigns of annihilation and mass extermination. 

As he remembered more than 200 of his media colleagues killed in Israel’s attempt to suppress the truth of the Gaza genocide, I watched Mahmoud on top of our now demolished refugee camp stripping his PRESS vest on camera in disbelief that he’s alive and returned.

Despite the fresh wounds, Abood shared a video of Mahmoud climbing the rubble as he asked: “Where’s our home?” Mahmoud replied: “It’s running an errand and returning shortly.” 

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Rising from the ashes

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but their attitude is typical of Gaza residents who lost their homes, family, friends, neighbours and colleagues but refuse to be defeated and insist on rising from the ashes and holding onto their humanity.

Despite the intergenerational oppression “the free world” has inflicted on this tiny strip of Palestinian land, Gaza holds the freest people on earth that shame the rest of humanity for the devastating toll inflicted on them under everyone’s watch. 

The Gaza I know is in ruins, including my home and the schools, universities, health and cultural centres I attended. 

Nonetheless, the survivors represent outstanding examples of courage and defiance. 

It is a global responsibility to ensure Gaza’s sacrifice on behalf of humanity paves the way to ending Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, which emboldened it to unleash the world’s first live-streamed genocide.