Nesrine Malik writes:

Today, Sharm el-Sheikh will host the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others are meeting “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability”.

If the ceasefire holds, this language is an augur of the future. One where there is no reckoning, no addressing of root causes. Only a hurtling into the imperatives of cleanings-up and workings-out. All the while illegal occupation continues, and another chapter of Israel’s violations is furtively closed without accountability not only for Israel, but for its sponsors.

There is an Arabic expression, hameeha harameeha – meaning “its protector is its thief”, that comes to mind as those who have plied Israel with weaponry gather to figure out how to achieve peace in Gaza. Over the coming weeks and months, a Gaza even more devastated than what has been shown to the world so far will come into view. Already the colossal scale of what needs to be rebuilt is becoming clear. People are returning to their homes in Gaza City to find a wasteland flattened to the horizon by bombs and then bulldozers. In the images of the area, even the sunlight looks different and otherworldly. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realised it was because there were no structures to filter it. No shade, no shadows. A home returned to is just a plot on which to pitch another tent and wait for aid. But this time, with less risk of being bombed in your sleep.

People in Gaza have been released from the fear of death, but what of the life they now face? What of the thousands of orphans, and the wounded or maimed children with no surviving families? It is not just the infrastructure of large parts of Gaza that has been destroyed, it is also the social fabric. Family lineages across two, three, four generations have been wiped out. What of the thousands of parents who have buried their children? And of all those who have collected the body parts of their loved ones? How to even begin to think about addressing such mass trauma when there isn’t even a roof to gather under? I asked a man from Gaza about his brother, who had lost all his children and his wife in one strike. Where is he now? “Just constantly walking around, circling the rubble” of the site where they died. “Lost.” [Continue reading…]