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.
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, I 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. I constantly ask myself: “When will I embrace my dad and siblings again?” And I follow news of every round of ceasefire talks, only to have my own hopes dashed when they inevitably lead nowhere.
The narratives put forward by American politicians and media have parroted, against all evidence, Israeli claims about the limits of its war effort.
Speaking to Fox News in November 2023, Netanyahu said, “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza.”
The current siege of northern Gaza, along with a raft of other military actions, belie his words.
Displaced Palestinians on the border of Jabalia refugee camp being forcibly displaced by the Israeli army in Jabalia, Gaza, on Oct. 22, 2024. Photo: Mahmoud Sleem/Anadolu via Getty Images
When Israel invaded Rafah in May, Netanyahu promised a “limited” operation against Hamas militants. At the time, the White House was projecting optimism about Cairo-based negotiations between Israel and Hamas; American officials took Israel at its word.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said, “What we’ve been told by our Israeli counterparts is that this operation … was limited and designed to cut off Hamas’s ability to smuggle weapons and funds into Gaza.”
Instead of a targeted, limited campaign, what followed were annihilatory massacres.
Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city and the once promised “safe zone,” had been turned into a dust-covered ghost town.
“In Gaza, we thought that the Rafah ground offensive would lead to the end of the war because that is what Israel said worldwide,” Yosef, a 26-year-old university lecturer from Rafah, told me recently by phone. Yosef is currently living in a makeshift tent in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.
“The occupation authorities in Israel have been tormenting us with optimism.”
“The occupation authorities in Israel have been tormenting us with optimism,” he said. “They have been using hope to kill us. Now, hope is just another lethal tool that Israel is using against humanity in Gaza.”
Yosef added, “It’s more repugnant than their murdering bombs because you have to perish often rather than just once!”
The promises kept coming after Rafah. In August, Biden touted a forthcoming ceasefire: “We are closer than we’ve ever been.” According to reports at the time, however, Israel had made no reasonable concessions to give grounds to expect a deal. A senior Hamas official told the BBC that there had been no progress and that mediators were “selling illusions.”
Even U.S. officials have acknowledged that optimism about an approaching ceasefire has been misplaced. “No deal is imminent,” one U.S. official, speaking anonymously, told reporters in September. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
The Israeli military commenced its ground assault into southern Lebanon in early October, again employing the falsehood that it would be a precise operation against Hezbollah militants. The “precise” operation has included strikes in densely populated areas and indiscriminate explosions of booby-trapped electronics, resulting in the killing of more than 3,500 Lebanese.
Only after months of violence and devastation in Lebanon was a ceasefire deal reached on Tuesday; it went into effect on Wednesday morning. In the final hours of negotiations, Israel ramped up missile strikes on the heart of Beirut.
When I heard about the upcoming ceasefire in Lebanon, it called to mind the past deadly escalations by Israel on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 — just before temporary ceasefires went into effect. The ceasefires had brought feelings of euphoria, relief that we had survived. The break from the massacres, however, brought its own torments: taking stock of the massive destruction and loss.
For Palestinians from Gaza today, our feelings are again conflicted. We feel a relief for the people of Lebanon, who suffered violence for the sake of Gaza. We are also heartbroken that we are still being slaughtered. The Lebanon ceasefire is a reminder that we are still treated as subhuman.
Following the victory of President-elect Donald Trump, who promised in his campaign to bring lasting peace to the Middle East, some Palestinians I spoke with once again expressed hope for the end of the genocide. Trump, though, is Netanyahu’s closest political ally and friend.
Palestinians like me, waiting in fear for our loved ones, are left in another state of terrifying uncertainty.
We can’t trust Israeli or American leaders when they talk about a ceasefire, and yet we still yearn for our own day to come, to experience those last hours before a ceasefire, when we might truly envision an end to the deadliest year in our recent history.
