Bombing has stopped in Gaza, but the tragedy is only beginning

This article was originally published in Religion News Service on October 10, 2025. You can read the original here.

As the dust settles once again over Gaza as an Israel-Hamas ceasefire takes effect, many outside its borders are imagining the end of a tragedy. The sky is quieter, the headlines are sure to fade and the world may mistake the silence for peace the same way it did before Oct. 7, 2023, as Palestinians lived a routine daily humiliation of occupation.

But for those still standing amid the rubble in Gaza, this is when the real disaster begins. It may not be the noise of bombs, at least for now, but the ache that follows.

I learned something about that ache to a much lesser extent 20 years ago in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In those early months, when the city was covered in mud and memory, the world wanted to move too quickly from relief to recovery. Volunteers arrived, cameras rolled and then, too soon, they left. We thought the disaster was over because the water receded, but the storm only revealed the depth of the wounds. The despair set in not during the flood, but in the months that followed, when the world stopped looking.

That memory stays with me as I think of Gaza. Each time the bombs stop, people there are told to rebuild. But how do you rebuild when the ground remembers every loss? When the same hands that bury loved ones must also lay new bricks, knowing they may one day return to the same graveyard?

Survival in Gaza is, historically, not followed by recovery, but another round of survival. There is no breath between one catastrophe and the next. I once wrote that Gaza never gets to heal — it only learns to endure. And endurance, while sacred, is not the same as healing.

When I speak with families there, I am struck not just by their grief but their exhaustion. One father told me, “Every time I rebuild, I have less to build with.” His words carry both the material truth of ruin and the spiritual toll of repetition. What happens to a people who are never allowed to exhale?

The Quran tells us that “with hardship comes ease,” but ease does not always mean escape. Sometimes ease is the quiet strength to wake up again, to say Alhamdulillah — all praise is due to God — with trembling lips, to believe that even in destruction, God still witnesses and holds every unseen grief. Faith becomes not an escape from pain, but the courage to feel it fully and to keep living anyway.

Earlier this year, when a temporary ceasefire was announced, I wrote that hope in Gaza comes wrapped in caution. People there celebrated survival while bracing for the next blow. This time, even that fragile hope is gone. When the latest ceasefire came, the voice that once announced it to the world, Anas al-Sharif, was silent — and not naturally. Like hundreds of other journalists in Gaza, he was silenced by slaughter. Al-Sharif, who became a symbol of endurance during the last war, was martyred in this one. I still have voice notes from him from the final week of his life. His words were filled not with fear, but fatigue, as if he knew he would not live to see another dawn.

In humanitarian language, we speak of “post-conflict recovery.” But what if there is no “post”? What if tragedy is always there, invisible, inescapable, yet seeping into every corner of life?

The most dangerous illusion the world holds is that bombs define the disaster. The disaster is what remains when the bombs stop: the amputations, the orphans, the hunger, the sleeplessness, the phone that will never ring again. The world counts the dead, but it does not know how to count the living who carry death inside them.

I think back to Katrina, those months when the city was quiet but the pain was loud. People who had lost everything were asked to rebuild, but no one asked if they could bear it. We were measuring progress in concrete when the real devastation was in the invisible grief, displacement and disorientation. The same is true for Gaza to a much larger extent. The world wants to rebuild its buildings, but Gaza needs us to tend to its broken hearts and shattered lives.

In Islam, we believe the Earth itself bears witness to every injustice — that even the stones and the soil will one day testify. Perhaps that is why the ground in Gaza feels so heavy, so full of memory. Every demolished home, every uprooted tree, every unmarked grave is a silent witness to a pain the world would rather not confront.

So when the bombs stop, I no longer say “at least it’s over.” For Gaza, it never is. The rubble and fear remain. But, so does the faith. That faith is a sermon the whole world needs to hear.

The silence after war is not peace, but an open wound — a sacred space that demands our attention. If we can learn to listen to the silence, sit with the grief instead of rushing past it, then maybe the world can begin to heal, too, because Gaza’s wounds do not belong to Gaza alone. They reveal what kind of humanity we have chosen to be.