One month after the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinians of Gaza have begun improvising a new life amid the wreckage of the old.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas are playing a game of nerves every week of the truce. On Saturday, all eyes will be on the expected release of three more hostages, according to the schedule laid down in the ceasefire agreement. If Hamas fails to deliver, Israel is threatening to go back to war with the same ferocity that turned cities into rubble over 15 months.
Now there is a new, unanticipated blot hanging over Gaza’s already clouded future. Every Palestinian here has heard about Donald Trump’s bizarre plan for the US to “own” Gaza, somehow empty the coastal territory of its 2.2 million people, and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on their land. No one the Guardian talked to in Gaza treated the threat as a joke, but their reactions were consistent: if one of the most intense, destructive bombing campaigns in history failed to drive them from their homes, then the American real estate tycoon turned president will also surely fail.
“Who is Trump to decide our fate, plan our future, and control Gaza?” said Ayat, a 33-year-old mother of three girls, who returned a week ago to their home in the al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza to find it burned out and partly demolished. “All these plans are nonsense and will fail. Our homes are rubble, and we are living on top of it. How do you expect us to leave?
“They want us to go to Egypt, to the Sinai desert. Where will we live there? They want us to go to Jordan, but it is already full of Palestinian refugees. We do not want to live in other countries, and no one wants us to live in their country.”
Ayat has confidence the ceasefire will hold for the simple reason it is in no one’s interest to start fighting again.
“If the war was to return in a few days, then why was there a ceasefire?” she asked. “Israel does not want the war to continue because everyone is tired and it has achieved many goals. They are recovering the hostages, and in my opinion they have achieved their goal of changing the Middle East.”
She can imagine leaving Gaza for a few years for the sake of her daughters’ education, but says she would return. In the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel her family was driven out of Kawkaba, a small town in southern Palestine, and fled to Gaza.
“We lived with the regret of leaving our home town behind. Will we make the same mistake twice?” Ayat asked. “We live in Gaza, and here we have learned patience, determination and willpower. We have learned how to love life and not fear death. It is true that Gaza has caused us sadness, pain and anger, but we were chosen to live here, and in the end we will be the winners in this place.”
She added: “Gaza has been destroyed before and we rebuilt it and we will do it again. This is the best option. No one wants us, and we cannot live anywhere else.”
Like Ayat, Mohammed Dabbash, a 26-year-old from the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City, feels confident the ceasefire will last. He works as a news presenter for several media outlets and is also a poet who writes Palestinian anthems. His sister and all her family were killed in the bombings and his family home was left in ruins.
He was displaced 10 times over the course of the war and is adamant that no new conflict nor Trump will make him, his family, or the 2 million other Palestinians in Gaza give up their homes and land once more, to make way for a beach resort.
“Honestly, Trump knows exactly what he is saying, and I don’t take his statements lightly,” Dabbash said. “He is determined to turn Gaza into his building site, but he will not succeed and no free person will comply. Today, we return to the rubble, gathering the remnants of memories, and trying to piece together our shattered souls.
“The light of determination will never fade, and we will not become slaves in Trump’s hands.”
One of the lessons that the war has taught the Palestinians is that in besieged Gaza there is no escaping the bombs. The supposed “humanitarian zones” were the targets of airstrikes as were the cities. If we are to die, people say, next time we will choose to die in our homes.
Eleven-year-old Aseel Somad’s family has just completed the long, painful walk from southern Gaza back home to the Shati camp (also known as the Beach camp), carrying their remaining possessions with them. When they finally arrived they found they were among the lucky few whose house was still intact.
“I do not expect the war to return soon, but it could return in the coming years, and that is my biggest fear right now,” Aseel said. “So I am asking the world not to abandon us in the face of this occupation. They have to stop the war from coming back because we are tired and we have lost so much.”
He spelled out the principal reasons why Trump’s plans for Gaza would fail. He could imagine some who had lost everything may take up the promise of resettlement, but the neighbouring countries would never accept the mass immigration of Palestinians and most would not want to go in the first place.
For the great majority, he said, “the soil of Gaza is better than the best countries in the world”.
