Gaza Herald_ There are no quiet nights in Gaza, not before the ceasefire, and not since the Sharm el-Sheik “peace” declaration.
At the Egyptian resort, world leaders smiled for cameras, shaking hands with U.S. President Donald Trump, who boasted that he had ended not only the war but “3,000 years of history.” Behind the fanfare, Israel never paused its assault for a single moment.
The bombs did not stop. This morning, Gaza awoke to parents carrying the bodies of their children, and to mothers weeping over sons and daughters killed in their sleep. Israeli warplanes struck homes across the Strip, killing 104 civilians, including 46 children and 18 members of a single family.
They died quietly, without names or headlines. No one will print their ages, imagine their dreams, or recall the last words they spoke before going to bed for the final time.
A Humanity Denied
For most of the world, Palestinians have been reduced to an abstraction, faceless victims stripped of stories, memories, and futures. The world does not weep for them as it does for Israelis.
When Israeli hostages were released, their faces filled television screens and newspaper columns. Reporters told their stories, their fears, their favorite foods, and the names of the loved ones waiting for them.
On the day of the ceasefire, Israeli channels broadcast the image of a smiling mother waking her son to tell him his father, a freed hostage, was coming home. The presenters on television cried with her. Streets across Israel were lined with flags to celebrate the return of twenty hostages who had survived their own government’s bombs.
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces raided the homes of Palestinian prisoners listed for release. “The soldiers threatened us,” said Razan, the daughter of detainee Taleb Makhamreh from Yatta. “They told us we were forbidden to celebrate. They shot randomly in the neighborhood and wounded a young man.”
Palestinians, it seems, are not allowed to grieve or to rejoice.
Unequal Pain
When freed Palestinian prisoner Haitham Salem returned to Gaza, he learned that his wife and three children had been killed two weeks earlier. In video footage from a hospital, he trembles as he asks: “Are my kids alive? They’re dead… I swear they are dead. In four days, it was supposed to be my daughter’s birthday.”
He held up a small bracelet he had crafted for her while in detention. “I made this for her myself,” he cried.
His daughter was the same age as the son of an Israeli hostage whose reunion was celebrated across the world. But no one mourned Haitham’s family. No cameras arrived to capture his heartbreak.
For Palestinians, pain is never equal. Their deaths are met with silence; their humanity dismissed. Israel proclaims its “right to defend itself,” yet no one speaks of the Palestinians’ right to live, let alone to defend themselves.
Across the occupied West Bank, settlers protected by the Israeli army continue to burn cars, destroy olive trees, and shoot civilians with impunity. Every day brings new acts of terror that no government dares to name.
Ceasefire Without Peace
More than 68,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, including over 20,000 children. Still, the bombs fall. Overnight, another hundred lives can be taken with a single Israeli strike, often pre-approved by Washington. Yet, by dawn, diplomats insist that the “ceasefire” remains intact.
During a football riot in Tel Aviv, one Israeli fan told a reporter: “The police beat everyone up. We’re not in Jabalia.” It was an unspoken truth that Israel’s violence in Gaza has no limits, no laws, no shame.
The same governments that signed the Sharm el-Sheik peace declaration tell Palestinians that freedom can only come through negotiation. But Israel has already taught the world what its “agreements” mean: promises broken before the ink dries; ceasefires shattered before the dust settles.
Now, a new postwar reality is being shaped, a “model” where Israel is free to kill and occupy at will, legitimized by those who smiled beside Trump in Egypt. The so-called right to defend itself has morphed into a permanent “right to respond,” a euphemism for Israel’s unending license to slaughter Palestinians whenever it chooses.
