When the Israeli attack took place on Saturday, Faik was going to buy some goods from a nearby vegetable shop.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
“I survived by a miracle. I had just crossed the road,” he told Al Jazeera. The Palestinian described his shock – and also his fear – that it was his home that was hit by the Israeli attack.
This was not the case, and as he ran back to the scene, he found his family physically safe. But his three young daughters trembled with fear, worried that Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – which had been suspended since the beginning of a ceasefire in October – was back.
Since the ceasefire began, Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza, accusing the Palestinian group Hamas of ceasefire violations. Hamas denies this, and Palestinians say it is Israel that has used overwhelming force since the ceasefire began, violating it 500 times, and killing more than 342 civilians, including 67 children.
The five killed in the al-Abbas neighborhood of Gaza City, where Faiq lives, were among 24 killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip on Saturday.
“This is a nightmare, not a ceasefire,” Fack said. “After some peace, in an instant, life changes as if it is war again.”
“You see body parts, smoke, broken glass, dead people, ambulances. Scenes from which we still have not recovered and which have not left our memories.”
‘Lost hope in everything’
Faik, 29 and originally from the Tufah area of eastern Gaza City, has suffered greatly during the war. He described losing 30 members of his extended family, including his parents and brother’s children, in February 2024, following an Israeli attack on the house where they were all living. The attack seriously injured his wife, forcing doctors to amputate one of her fingers.
“My mother and father were killed, my brother’s son, my aunt, my cousin… the whole family was destroyed,” Faik recalled.
Faiq has since moved his family to Gaza City and central Gaza to escape Israeli forces, all in search of “a safety that does not exist”, as he puts it.
Since October, he has been trying to achieve what he calls a “so-called ceasefire”, but says there is still no security.
“Every few days, there’s a wave of bombings and targeted attacks, and without any warning everything turns upside down.”
He added, “We are tired.” “Life in Gaza is 99 percent gone, and the ceasefire was only 1 percent of the effort to revive it. But we have lost hope in everything.”
Faik worked with his father in the clothing business, but they lost everything due to the war. He cannot reach his home, which is inside Israel’s “yellow line,” which is completely under Israeli control, where Palestinians’ access is heavily restricted.
“There is no construction, no work, no infrastructure, no life and no security,” Faik said. “So, where is the end of the war?”
“Today I sit at home for 24 hours and there is no sign of life,” he said. “We are living on bitterness… We are not just desperate. We are in a devastation. Let us live… Let us reopen our shops… Let the crossings reopen… Let us live our lives.”
no second step
The question of what happens next in Gaza continues to be endlessly debated both inside and outside the Palestinian enclave.
20 points of United States President Donald Trump plan for Gaza now calls for a transitional technocratic government, composed of “qualified Palestinians and international experts”, under the supervision of an international “peace board”, to be led by Trump himself.
The plan also talks about an economic development strategy and an international stabilization force, designed to signal that stability and progress are on the cards for Gaza.
But details are still unclear, particularly as the US and Israel reject any future role for Hamas, and the enormous amount of devastation left by Israel in Gaza means it will take years to rebuild the territory.
Israel itself is unwilling to end the war completely, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under pressure from his far-right political allies.
Ahad Farwana, a Palestinian political analyst and expert on Israeli affairs, believes that Israel wants the current situation in Gaza to continue and avoids moving towards rebuilding the strip.
“The Israeli occupation is working to consolidate a situation similar to what is happening in southern Lebanon by escalating cases from time to time and through continuous killings,” Farwana said.
Israel agreed to a ceasefire with the Lebanese group Hezbollah in November 2024 after a year-long conflict that left most of Hezbollah’s leadership dead. However, since then, Israel has continued to attack Lebanon from time to time, including on Sunday, when a Hezbollah military commander was killed in Beirut, and on November 18 in an attack on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon that killed at least 13 people.
Farwana believes that Israeli attacks in Gaza are not merely a military strategy, but part of a long-term approach to perpetuate chaos and avoid any ensuing political obligations.
“Netanyahu does not want to move into a second phase, where sensitive topics such as the reconstruction and governance of Gaza will be addressed,” the analyst told Al Jazeera, referring to the next phase of the ceasefire. Instead, he thinks Israel plans to expand the area under its control “in order to seize as much land as possible from the Gaza Strip so that it will have the upper hand in any future arrangement”.
internal purpose
Many observers believe that Netanyahu’s desire to avoid moving forward on a ceasefire agreement is partly the result of domestic political calculations.
Israeli politics is more divided on whether a politician’s stance is for or against Netanyahu rather than left or right, with the prime minister aware that falling from power could spell the end of his political career and expose him to scrutiny over his role in the failures of the October 7 attack. He is currently facing multiple trials for corruption, a legal process that will likely accelerate if he loses the upcoming elections, which is expected to take place sometime before October 2026.
But despite the Netanyahu government’s evasive tactics when it comes to a ceasefire, Farwana says it is unlikely that the scale of Israeli attacks in Gaza will return to levels before the agreement’s implementation.
“There is a lot of pressure, especially from the US administration,” Farwana said. “Donald Trump wants his plan – the so-called (peace board), stability force and other components – to succeed.”
“The situation will be limited to the expansion of the Yellow Zone and continued targeted attacks from time to time. It may gradually expand, but not to the point of returning to the first situation.” But Farwana said, that limbo situation means Gazans will ultimately feel “no real peace.”
Raghda Obeid, a 32-year-old mother of four, knows this situation well.
She has already gone through an endless cycle of displacement, and her home in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City has been completely destroyed. Now, what scares him most is that war will return.
Raghada is currently living in a tent with her family in western Gaza City. Last week there was an Israeli attack on this area.
“The moment of the last attack was as terrible as the first day of the war,” Raghda said, describing how her children were terrified. “We could see smoke in the distance, people were running and screaming in the streets carrying dead people and their torn bodies.”
“I was scared, too. I’m an adult, and I was scared. I said, ‘That’s it, the war is back, and now it’s our turn,'” she said with a sad smile.
Like much of Gaza’s population, Raghada and her family are at the mercy of aid organizations, relying on them for food, with very few opportunities for work available.
The reality is that they will be living in tents for the foreseeable future, including through winter and the harsh weather it brings.
Every day, Raghda and her husband’s mission is to find food and fetch water. Their children keep running from one place to another in search of community kitchens to secure food.
“I don’t know what is expected of us. It’s been more than two years, and we’re entering the third so displaced and broken. Is there no solution for us?”
“We have no income,” Raghda said. “Our life is non-existent. We depend on community kitchens and water. Our life is a war without a real war.”
<a href