Lebanon Gets Ceasefire, But Palestinians in Gaza Can Only Hope

In the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Hajja Em Khalid listened to the news “night and day” on her small transistor radio — one of the few objects she opted to take with her when, displaced by the war, she left home.

The old-school radio had played Em Khalid the news, since the 1970s, of various Israeli crimes. It accompanied her through the many wars she had witnessed. The radio connects her with the world.

Five of her siblings and four of her grandchildren were killed in December 2023 in an Israeli “belt of fire” — a term I grew up hearing in Gaza, a Palestinian version of “carpet bombing,” or an intense series of airstrikes meant to devastate local infrastructure.

“Israel’s announcements about progress in negotiations turned out to be a mirage.”

“Since the war began, I have obsessively followed the news,” she said. “Every time I had a reason to hope that I might again embrace my grandchildren, Israel’s announcements about progress in negotiations turned out to be a mirage.”

Israeli and Western leaders had claimed that Hamas head Yahya Sinwar’s assassination could mark a turning point in Israel’s war. The Biden administration, for example, had long described Sinwar as a barrier to achieving a ceasefire deal.

When Sinwar was killed, President Joe Biden said it was an “opportunity” for a ceasefire. In a press conference shortly after the killing, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the fight would go on: “The war, my dear ones, is not yet over.”

It was only the latest example of the Biden administration sending groundless signals that this brutal war is in its final chapters.

Unwarranted optimism from the West, even if it is just a performance, has done no favors to the Palestinians who, for the most part, have themselves lost all reasons for hope.

And while a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was announced Tuesday night – negotiated as Israel intensified its strikes on Beirut – there remains no realistic hope for an end to the genocidal war on Gaza.

As a Palestinian from Gaza, watching politicians sell my people false narratives of hope over the last year has been painful. Western leaders are gaslighting us.

Em Khalid thought, for instance, that Sinwar’s killing in October would end the onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip — a notion pushed publicly by U.S. officials.

She said, “This was what Israel promised several times.”

In the end, the result was the same: no deal. Ceasefires, it seems, can work even for Lebanon, but Palestinians in Gaza are damned to mere hopes.

My Unrealized Hopes

At the beginning of the Israeli ground offensive, I watched from my home in the north as thousands of leaflets fell from Israeli aircraft. They delivered orders telling us to evacuate to the so-called “safe zones” in the south.

On October 9, 2023, before we could even arrange to comply with the orders, Israeli fighter jets stormed overhead and bombed our densely populated neighborhood.

My arm was severely injured in the bombing. My mother, who worked at the United Nations, and my sister, who was a physiotherapist, were both killed.

My father, my surviving siblings, and I fled to the south. We thought we would be gone for a couple days then be able to return home.

Like thousands of displaced families in southern Gaza, we moved into a makeshift tent in November 2023 – freezing in the winter and hellishly hot in the summer.

When after a few days I proposed to my father that I build some shelves in our tent to make it more hospitable, my father reacted with indignation. “Are you crazy, Ahmad?” he admonished me. “It is only a matter of time. We will return in a couple of days.”

We lived with the constant fear of history repeating itself, that another Nakba was afoot. We did not know that the horrors we would live to tell about our present would dwarf those of the past.

I took the only path there was out of Gaza. It’s now blocked. My family remains trapped.

We yearned to go back to where our home once stood, particularly to visit my mom’s and sister’s graves. The task may prove to be tragically impossible: The Israeli military has reportedly unearthed and moved many bodies from cemeteries in Jabalia.

The days in tents turned into months. In early March, on my father’s insistence, I left Gaza. My injured arm needed surgery and, with Gaza’s health infrastructure decimated, needed to travel to Egypt.

I took the only path there was out of Gaza. It’s now blocked. My family remains trapped, with seemingly no end to the war in sight.

No one in Gaza knows if they are going to be reunited with their family members abroad.