Stuck in Gaza’s limbo: Palestinians battle to dwell amid Israel’s assaults | Israel-Palestine battle | USAEMALL.com

Gaza City – Near a burned-out car that had been targeted in front of their home, Faiq Ajour stood with other family members cleaning up scattered debris and shattered glass.

Faiq had been on his way to buy a few items from a nearby vegetable stall when the Israeli strike hit on Saturday.

“I survived by a miracle. I had just crossed the street,” he told Al Jazeera. The Palestinian described his shock – and his fear that it was his house that had been hit by the Israeli attack.

That wasn’t the case, and as he ran back towards the scene, he found his family, physically unharmed. But his three young daughters shook with fear, worried that Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – which was supposed to have been suspended after the introduction of a ceasefire in October – had returned.

Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza since that ceasefire began, accusing the Palestinian group Hamas of ceasefire violations. Hamas denies that, and Palestinians point out that it is Israel that has used overwhelming force since the ceasefire began, violating it 500 times, and killing more than 342 civilians, including 67 children.

The five killed in Gaza City’s al-Abbas area, where Faiq lives, were among 24 killed on Saturday across the Gaza Strip by Israel.

“This is a nightmare, not a ceasefire,” Faiq said. “In a single moment after some calm, life turns as if it’s a war again.”

“You see body parts, smoke, shattered glass, killed people, ambulances. Scenes we still haven’t healed from and that haven’t left our memories.”

‘Lost hope in everything’

Faiq, 29 years old and originally from eastern Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood, has suffered immensely during the war. He described losing 30 members of his extended family in February 2024, including his parents and his brother’s children, after an Israeli strike on a house they were all staying in. The strike severely injured his wife, forcing doctors to amputate one of her fingers.

“My mother and father were killed, my brother’s son, my aunt, my cousins … the whole family was gone,” Faiq recalled.

Faiq has since moved his family across Gaza City and to central Gaza to escape Israeli forces, all in search of “a safety that doesn’t exist”, as he puts it.

Since October, he has been trying to adapt to what he calls “the so-called ceasefire”, but says there is still no safety.

“Every few days, there’s a wave of bombardment and targeted strikes, and everything is turned upside down without warning.”

“We are exhausted,” he added. “Life in Gaza is 99 percent dead, and the ceasefire was just 1 percent of an attempt to revive it. But we have lost hope in everything.”

Faiq used to work with his father in the clothing trade, but the war has meant that they have lost everything. He can’t reach his home, which is inside what Israel terms the “yellow line”, under total Israeli control, with access for Palestinians heavily restricted.

“There’s no construction there, no work, no infrastructure, no life, and no safety,” Faiq said. “So, where is the end of the war?”

“Today I just sit at home 24 hours a day, and there’s no sign of life,” he added. “We’re surviving on bitterness … We’re not just frustrated. We’re in a catastrophe. Let us live … let us reopen our shops … reopen the crossings … let us live our lives.”

No second phase

The question of what comes next in Gaza continues to be endlessly debated, both inside and outside of the Palestinian enclave.

United States President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza now calls for a transitional technocratic government, made up of “qualified Palestinians and international experts”, all under the supervision of an international “board of peace”, to be headed by Trump himself.

The plan also talks about an economic development strategy and an international stabilisation force, all designed to signal that stability and progress are on the cards for Gaza.

But the details are still unclear, particularly as the US and Israel reject any future role for Hamas, and the sheer amount of devastation left behind by Israel in Gaza, meaning that a rebuild of the territory will take years.

Israel itself is also unwilling to fully commit to an end to the war, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under pressure from his far-right political allies.

Ahed Farwana, a Palestinian political analyst and a specialist in Israeli affairs, believes that Israel wants the current state of limbo in Gaza to continue and avoid moving on to the reconstruction of the Strip.

“The Israeli occupation is working to entrench a situation similar to what is happening in southern Lebanon by escalating matters every now and then and through continuous assassinations,” said Farwana.

Israel agreed to a ceasefire with the Lebanese group Hezbollah in November 2024 after a one-year conflict that saw most of the latter’s leadership killed. However, since then, Israel has continued to periodically attack Lebanon, including on Sunday, when a Hezbollah military commander was killed in Beirut, and at least 13 people were killed in an attack on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on November 18.

Farwana believes that Israeli attacks in Gaza are not merely a military tactic, but part of a long-term vision to perpetuate chaos and avoid any upcoming political obligations.

“Netanyahu does not want to move to the second phase,” the analyst told Al Jazeera, referring to the next phase of the ceasefire, where sensitive topics such as the reconstruction and administration of Gaza would be addressed. Instead, he thinks that Israel plans to expand the area under its control “to seize as much land as possible from the Gaza Strip so that it has the upper hand in any future arrangements” for the enclave.

Internal motives

Many observers believe that Netanyahu’s desire to avoid moving forward with the ceasefire deal is partly the result of domestic political calculations.

With Israeli politics divided more by whether a politician’s stance is for or against Netanyahu, rather than left or right, the prime minister knows that a fall from power could spell the end of his political career and lead to investigations into his role in the failures that allowed for the October 7 attack. He currently faces multiple trials for corruption, a legal process that would likely speed up should he lose the upcoming elections, expected sometime before October 2026.

But despite the Netanyahu government’s evasion tactics when it comes to the ceasefire, Farwana says it is unlikely that the scale of Israel’s attacks in Gaza will return to what they were before the implementation of the agreement.

“There are significant pressures, especially from the US administration,” said Farwana. “Donald Trump wants his plan – the so-called [board of peace], stability forces, and other components – to succeed.”

“The situation will remain limited to expanding the yellow zone and to ongoing targeted attacks every now and then. It may expand gradually, but not to the point of returning to square one.” But that state of limbo, Farwana said, means that the people of Gaza will ultimately not be able to feel “any real calm”.

It is a situation Raghda Obeid, a 32-year-old mother of four, knows all too well.

She has already been through endless cycles of displacement, and her home in the Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City is completely destroyed. Now, what terrifies her the most is that the war will return.

Raghda is currently living with her family in a tent in western Gaza City. An Israeli strike hit the area last week.

“The moment of the last strike was terrifying, just like the first day of the war,” Raghda said, recounting how her children were terrified. “We could see the smoke from afar, people were running and screaming in the streets, carrying the killed and their torn bodies.”

“I was also terrified. I’m an adult, and I was scared. I said, ‘That’s it, the war is back, and it’s our turn now,’” she added with a sad smile.

Like most of the population of Gaza, Raghda and her family are at the mercy of aid organisations, relying on them for food, with few opportunities for work available.

The reality is that they will be living in a tent for the foreseeable future, including during the winter, and the harsh weather it will bring.

Each day, Raghda and her husband’s mission is to find food and fetch water. Their children run from place to place looking for a community kitchen to secure a meal.

“I don’t know what is expected of us. It’s been more than two years, and we are entering the third, displaced and broken like this. Isn’t there any solution for us?”

“We have no income,” Raghda said. “Our life is nonexistent. We live off the community kitchen and water. Our life is a war without an actual war.”