When Sabah al-Qarra first returned to her home in the Gaza Strip town of Khuzaa seven weeks ago, she was careful not to get too comfortable. There was a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but she didn’t trust it.
But as the days turned to weeks, Ms. Qarra and her family tacked sheets of nylon over the blown-out glass windows and hauled rubble from the bombed-out rooms. They installed solar panels and, when Ramadan arrived, strung twinkly crescent- and star-shaped lights to celebrate the holy month.
It felt, at last, like life could begin again.
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A ceasefire brought a glimmer of hope to the Gaza Strip. As airstrikes resume, its population is left wondering: Has the world turned its back?
Then the bombs began to fall.
On Tuesday, Israel resumed airstrikes in Gaza, killing 500 people, including 200 children, local authorities said, sending Ms. Qarra and her family fleeing once more. On Thursday, after days of calling on the international community to push Israel back to the negotiation table, Hamas responded in kind, launching rockets into central Israel. Meanwhile, Israel began a new ground offensive in northern Gaza.
The developments spelled an end to the stalled ceasefire negotiations, which had tried the patience of both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ allies. But for Gazans, the resumption of fighting simply laid bare their greatest fear: The world had turned its back.
“We were let down and left behind” by the international community, says journalist Yafa Abu Akar. “No one cares.”
The father
The ceasefire that began in January brought with it to Gaza an unfamiliar emotion: hope.
Families returned to their collapsed homes and began to haul away the detritus. Mahmoud al-Batran cleared a single room in his family’s home in the Bureij refugee camp. The local school was a bombed-out shell, but it soon reopened, and Mr. Batran’s children went back. It felt like a sign that they could finally return “to the normal life we were deprived of,” he says.
At times, the glimmers of hope were just that – glimmers. Three weeks ago, in violation of the ceasefire and international humanitarian law, the Israeli government blocked all aid, food, fuel, and shelter from entering Gaza. At the same time, the Israeli government was resisting scheduled talks for the second phase of a more permanent ceasefire agreement. Instead the United States floated a short-term “bridge proposal,” which Hamas balked at.
But it was the airstrikes this week that shattered the sense of possibility once and for all. “I don’t know how many times I have to start from scratch,” Mr. Batran says from the tent where he is now staying on Salah ad-Din Street in central Gaza.
As heavy rains lashed his flimsy shelter, he explained that he was pessimistic Israel would ever return to the bargaining table. The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had declared his determination to continue the war, and so far there had been no diplomatic intervention from either the West or the Arab world. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that President Donald Trump “fully supports Israel and the IDF and the actions that they’ve taken in recent days.”
“We were abandoned by everyone,” Mr. Batran says. In a dripping tent, with an empty stomach, he wondered aloud if he and his family would ever be able to find “the energy [or] the desire” to start again.
The journalist
For 13 months, Ms. Abu Akar broadcast Gaza’s suffering live to the world as the correspondent for the Iraqi Alahad TV network.
And so the ceasefire, when it came, was a reprieve not only from the fighting but also from the burden of bearing witness to it. At last, she could spend time at home with her three children.
But when the airstrikes began this week, Ms. Abu Akar didn’t hesitate. She pulled on a vest emblazoned with the word “PRESS” and went back out. On Wednesday evening, she received shattering news. Her aunt and 14 other relatives had died in an airstrike.
Still, she didn’t stop. She went out again, to streets where she could hear children weeping from beneath crushed buildings, alive but unreachable. She worried about how tired the world seemed to have become of hearing bad news from Gaza.
“Palestinian lives have become so undervalued that reports of 50 children killed barely register,” she says.
But she wasn’t willing to let any of them die in silence.
“We must speak about it,” she says. “We must tell the stories.”
For Ms. Qarra, her family’s wartime story is repeating itself again.
“We are not meant to be happy,” she says. “We are not meant to have a moment of respite.”
Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.
