Alwaght- Gaza war tragedy is coming to an end for over 2 million people in the besieged enclave with all its bitterness and its apocalyptic scenes.
The ceasefire the Gazans have been waiting for months has finally come to effect and now the innocent Gaza children can sleep in calm after 16 months of terrifying bombing and pass the day without a fear of losing their family members and friends.
The story of the children of Gaza in these 16 months, like the story of the mothers and the elderly and the medical staff and the journalists of Gaza, is a unbearable tragedy and one could write about the suffering of the civilians for years without being able to fully describe their plight.
Certainly, one aspect of this indescribable reality is the glory of Gaza's perseverance under the burden of tragedies that, without exaggeration, a much smaller degree of which could bring any nation to its knees and force it to surrender. A perseverance that recorded a new standard and measure for this word and brought it to the forefront in the most magnificent way possible— the same perseverance that broke the back of the armed-to-the-teeth, US and NATO-backed Israeli military and humiliated it in front of the world and ultimately forced the swaggering Netanyahu to accept a humiliating ceasefire and defeat.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had several times said that he will continue war until obliteration of Hamas and there will be no deal with this resistance movement. On July 16, he asserted he will not walk back from this aim no matter what would be the costs.
Netanyahu said "despite the exorbitant costs that Israel may incur in the war with Gaza, Hamas must be defeated." But he ignored the fact that all of the more than 2 million residents of Gaza, from infants to women, men, and the elderly, showed that they are heroic and see no distance or difference between themselves and the resistance.
Netanyahu and the regime's strategists, under the illusion that by committing widespread and mind-boggling crimes against civilians and imposing unbearable conditions of displacement, hunger, suffering from illness, cold, heat, and insecurity, they can break the threshold of Palestinian endurance and create a rift between the resistance and the people by stirring social discontent, and through this, Hamas will be forced to accept the conditions of the occupiers, and thus the resistance will be buried forever in Gaza. In this wrong and evil way, they have repeatedly ruined the land of Gaza from north to south with blind carpet bombings and tanks and armored vehicles. They have repeatedly displaced the people of Gaza from north to south. They have even dropped bombs on tents of the displaced civilians in camps and temporary settlements.
During this period, the refugee camps of Al-Bureij, Al-Nussirat, Al-Maghazi and Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza Gaza Strip, the Jabalia refugee camp in the north, the Mawasi refugee camp in Khan Yunis and the Rafah camp in the south where about 1.5 million refugees settled repeatedly came under bombing, killing and dismemberment of innocent civilians.
According to available reports, from October 7, 2023 to January 2025, the Israeli army has dropped a significant amount of explosives on the Gaza Strip. Specifically, some sources have estimated the volume of these explosives to be about 79,000 tons. In other words, Israel used 40 kilograms of explosives for every citizen of Gaza.
This is almost five times the amount of the nuclear bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II on August 6, 1945. More than a thousand Gazan families have been completely wiped out, with evidence even showing that the Israelis have deliberately and systematically tried to destroy them.
The children of Gaza were literally slaughtered, and the tragedy of the deaths of infants due to hunger and cold was the latest example of children being sacrificed in the path of Palestine’s liberation. According to the latest UNICEF announcement, as of October 7, 2023, 15,000 children have lost their lives. The official Palestinian Ministry of Health put the figure at 17,492 children.
This means that 35 children have been killed every day during the more than 15 months of war in Gaza. UNRWA also announced that in 2024, about 475 children every month, or 15 children every day, suffered permanent disabilities such as limb amputations and hearing loss as a result of the use of explosive weapons.
During this time, there were many shocking images such as Khaled Nabhan, a Palestinian grandfather, singing a lullaby while holding his martyred infant granddaughter and crying; “Rim was my dearest soul.”
But in the large open-air prison of Gaza, death may be easier than enduring life in the shadow of war and siege, where one must live with lack of health and spread of disease and constant hunger. In this war, the Israelis systematically put on the agenda the destruction of health system and hospitals and the killing of medical staff in Gaza.
On the anniversary of the Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, the UN in a report said that during the year, Israel attacked Gaza medical centers and hospitals more than 500 times, destroying 33 hospitals, 64 medical centers, 131 emergency stations, and shutdown of 90 percent of the health system of the world's most densely populated region.
These shocking figures should be placed alongside the lack of fuel in winter, the lack of electricity in summer, and the struggle against hunger all the time to develop a better understanding of the resistance and perseverance of the Palestinians.
Gaza authorities recently announced that 81 percent of the refugee tents are now uninhabitable and have been completely destroyed due to wear and tear and the effects of war and weather conditions.
Under the cowardly and ruthless siege, Palestinians were even forced to eat plant roots and animal fodder, but they endured all these sufferings and calamities for their cause, and the war could not shake their resolve.
In one of the images published on social media, an old woman in Gaza is cooking grass that she collected from the streets to feed her family. When asked what she is doing, shedding tears, she said: "I am cooking some grass. What else should we cook? What can we do?"
Despite all this plight, the people of Gaza with their perseverance and support to their resistance fighters shattered Netanyahu and his cabal's plots, as Gaza people see no gap between them and resistance to the occupation. During this war, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh lost three of his children and a grandchild before his assassination in July 31. He, however, saw no difference between his family and others. The resistance leaders and their families suffered hunger and displacement like ordinary people and this is what the Palestinians deeply believe in.
But today, the Palestinians once again tasted the sweetness of perseverance and confidence in their resistance as they sang the song of victory on the ruins of Gaza and they could quite obviously see how their resistance put the enemy on brink of collapse.
