I am tired. Tired of the survival label, tired of the suffering, tired of the world’s indifference, writes Mohammed R. Mhawish [photo credit: Getty Images]
When my family and I emerged from the rubble of our home in Gaza in December 2023, we didn’t know if the calm would last long enough to rebuild or even to grieve.
The same uncertainty is now present again, feeling like the moment of terror and fatigue has only paused but never actually passed. Once again, we’re trying to feel joy amid the uncertain calm of another ceasefire in Gaza.
For the first time in 15 months, the drones have stopped humming, the fighter jets have retreated, and the bombs have ceased to fall. Yet through the silence surfaces another form of pain for what has been lost — homes, dreams, and people who had endured too much for too long as the world deemed their lives disposable.
I covered this war from its first moments when the world seemed to hold its breath — only to exhale indifferently. I remember those early days, the first two months, when politicians and diplomats traded hollow platitudes and empty promises, never once acknowledging us as human beings enduring the unimaginable.
From the very beginning, the world’s silence has been deafening, its inaction as devastating as the bombs themselves. While our neighbourhoods burned, the world sat in studios and debated our worth on television, as if recognising our humanity might somehow extinguish the flames or save a single life.
As I watch the news of post-war Gaza, neighbourhoods where I walked day and night and reported from seem to no longer exist. It breaks my heart to see some of the places where I was born and raised are now just markers on a map of destruction.
I have stood in the ashes of schools, hospitals, and mosques — places that were once sanctuaries and are now graveyards. I have written the names of the dead, over and over, until my hands trembled and my heart grew heavy with the weight of their stories.
We welcome and so direly need the ceasefire. It is time we heal, that is, if we can heal. But a ceasefire does not erase the scars etched into our homes and the souls of us who survived.
It does not bring back our loved ones or rebuild what has been destroyed in our collective psyche. It does not address the root of the brutality: the decades of occupation, the blockade, and the systemic dehumanisation that has made Gaza an open-air prison.
It does not promise that the bombs will not fall again, that the cycle of death will not repeat, or that the next war will not be even more devastating.
Gaza needs solutions, not ceasefires
This is the unbearable truth that accompanies every moment of so-called moments of “peace” in Gaza. It is always temporary. Gaza remains under full-scale siege, its borders merely open for aid trucks and the dying, its people suffocating under a blockade that denies them the most basic human rights.
Even in the absence of bombs, the occupation strikes in the simplest forms of our lives. It persists in other forms—in the denial of medicine, clean water, and the ability to move freely, in the crushing of livelihoods and the erasure of hope.
I think of a nine-year-old boy I met in the ruins of his home in November 2023, his face streaked with dust and tears. He clung to me, as though I could offer answers, his broken toy held tight against his chest like a shield against a world that had already betrayed him.
His question, “Why do they hate us?” was piercing and unanswerable. I struggled to meet his gaze. I felt ashamed of my silence when I realised my inability to explain the cruelty he had endured. The weight of his pain stayed with me long after I left. After all, we all were in the face of such devastation. He was no older than 10, but his eyes were ancient, filled with pain no child should ever know.
The ceasefire does not answer his question. It does not give him back his home, his childhood, his sense of safety. It does not guarantee that he will have clean water to drink, medicine when he is sick, or a future free from fear. It does not promise that he will grow up in a world that sees him as human, that values his life as much as any other.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnThis is the fundamental flaw in the global response to Gaza’s enduring pain. Ceasefires in my home are treated as endpoints when they are, at best, intermissions.
In 2008, 2012, 2014, and lastly in 2021 war, the ceasefires following these wars left thousands dead and tens of thousands more displaced.
The lull in bombs was brief, as the root causes — the siege, the occupation, and the systemic denial of Palestinian rights — remained firmly in place. Aid flowed in to rebuild shattered infrastructure, but no efforts were made to dismantle the systems of oppression that perpetuate these endless policies of destruction.
Instead, the temporary calm only allowed for the groundwork of the next war to be laid, until a tragic inevitability that continues to haunt Gaza today. Ceasefires offer a momentary reprieve but no real solutions.
They allow the international community to look away, to pat itself on the back for urging “restraint” and “de-escalation,” while ignoring the conditions that make such violence inevitable. A ceasefire is not peace. It is merely the absence of warplanes. Lasting peace requires justice, and justice has always been denied to us, Palestinians.
Justice would mean accountability for the crimes committed against the people of Gaza. Justice would mean an end to the occupation, to the blockade, to the systemic dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Justice would mean recognising our right to exist, to live in freedom, and to determine our own future.
Justice would mean ensuring that no more children lose their homes, no more families are erased from the earth, no more lives are treated as expendable.
Without justice, a ceasefire is a fragile and fleeting thing. Liberation from the chains of occupation and the end of Gaza’s suffocating siege would mean families no longer fearing the loss of their homes, children playing under skies free of drones, and a people finally free to determine their destiny.
As a journalist, I have seen what justice would mean firsthand: it would mean the stories I tell are not of despair, but of hope. It would mean writing about a Gaza that is peaceful and thriving, not merely surviving.
Without this transformation, the silence after the bombs is merely an interlude to more suffering. It does not dismantle the systems of oppression that made the war possible.
It does not address the asymmetry of power that allows one side to occupy, besiege, and bomb with impunity while the other is left to endure. It does not challenge the narrative that paints Palestinians as aggressors or the double standards that measure our suffering against a skewed moral yardstick.
I am tired. Tired of the survival label, tired of the suffering, tired of the world’s indifference. I remember one night during the war, sitting in a corner of my shattered home, clutching my three-year-old son while the sound of bombs shook the earth. His tiny arms were wrapped around my neck, his tears soaking my shoulder as I whispered reassurances I didn’t believe myself.
That exhaustion — the bone-deep weariness of trying to protect him in a world that seems determined to break us — is a fatigue I carry every day. Tired of writing the same stories, of pleading for the same humanity, of watching the same horrors unfold again and again.
A ceasefire is not a solution. It is a moment of relief and a chance to tend to the wounded, to mourn the dead, to gather what remains of our shattered lives. But it is not enough. It will never be enough until the world stops treating us as collateral damage for an occupier’s “self-defence” rhetoric until we are seen as more than statistics in a news bulletin.
Mohammed R. Mhawish is an award-winning Palestinian multimedia journalist, writer, and researcher from Gaza City, and a guest author of the book A Land With A People
Follow him on Twitter: @MohammRafik
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.