Gaza After the Cease-fire: The Silence Is Not Peace

The bombs have stopped — but peace has not arrived. In Gaza, the sound of explosions has faded, yet the ache of loss fills every corner. Homes turned to dust. Hospitals bombed. Families gone. Children buried under the ruins of schools and shelters. More than 80,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023 — entire generations erased in what many call one of the darkest genocides in modern history.

This was not a war between armies. It was a war on life itself. Kids became targets. Doctors and journalists became martyrs. Whole neighborhoods were marked for destruction, as if existence itself was guilt.

Now, after the so-called cease-fire, the killing has not truly stopped. It has only changed form. Israel’s new strategy mirrors the occupation’s playbook in southern Lebanon: targeted assassinations, raids, and the slow violence of a siege meant to break the spirit of a people.

But Palestinians refuse to disappear. They rebuild with the same hands that have buried their loved ones. They plant trees beside ruins. They whisper hope into the ears of the living.

The world watched a genocide unfold in real time — and could not stop it. But the story does not end when the headlines fade. Gaza remains under siege. The West Bank remains occupied. Families continue to face dispossession, checkpoints, and fear.

Solidarity cannot exist only during the sound of bombs. If we care only when the violence is loud, we have misunderstood what it means to stand with a people. The oppression continues quietly — through blockades, land theft, and the slow suffocation of daily life.

The genocide, as a phase of mass slaughter, may have paused. But the system that made it possible — the apartheid, the colonization, the belief that an entire people can be punished for existing — continues.

To stand with Palestine is not to mourn only the dead, but to fight for the living. To see Palestinians not as victims, but as people who deserve their simplest rights: safety, freedom, and dignity.

The silence is not peace. The cease-fire is not justice. Our duty is to remember — and to keep speaking.