Israel Breaks Gaza Ceasefire
In a move backed by President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu authorized airstrikes that ended the ceasefire and killed hundreds of Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on March 18, 2025.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2025, pp. 20-21
Daily Life and Shattered Dreams in Gaza—Writers Share Their Stories
By Farida Algoul
AFTER 77 YEARS OF OCCUPATION, generations of Palestinians have endured horrific violence and oppression at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The people, the land and the walls of Gaza have witnessed pain and resistance, life and death, and the raw truth of Palestinian dehumanization that the occupation no longer tries to hide. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has unleashed ferocious violence on Gaza, meant to erase Palestinians as a people and as a nation. In addition to murdering and injuring more than 200,000 men, women and children, reducing most homes to rubble, and demolishing almost every structure of civil society, Israeli soldiers have left their mark with hateful graffiti and Jewish symbols.
Early in the genocide, I was forced to leave my family in the north. I returned to the north after the ceasefire to discover my family’s home mostly destroyed. But on a few standing walls, I saw drawings and slogans left by Israeli Occupation Forces. Scrawled in Hebrew the soldiers had written: “The north and south will be under our control, and there will be no return.” I had seen similar slogans on other walls during the trip: “Death to Gaza” and “We will occupy Gaza from north to south.” These words are a form of psychological warfare, meant to instill fear and humiliation in us. What Israel is telling us is this: we don’t just hate Hamas and Palestinian resistance. We want all of Gaza to die.
I can’t say I am surprised.
PROJECTING ISRAELI INVINCIBILITY
After its rampage in Gaza since October 2023 and its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israel is now acknowledged by much of the world to be a fascist state, engaged in a brutal occupation of over 6.5 million Palestinians. Now Israel has weaponized the Star of David. Once considered to be a religious symbol, it is now used to terrorize Palestinians and remind them who calls the shots. We saw these weaponized symbols painted on walls and buildings. And who can forget that Jerusalem man who, in August 2023, was branded with a Star of David on his face by Israeli police during his detention?
The rampant hate-filled graffiti and thousands of photos posted to social media reflect the normalized level of depravity and contempt for human Palestinian life, generally accepted in Israeli society. Since all Israeli men and women (except the Haredim) are required to serve in the military, they are all invested in the military. Pervasive dehumanization of the Palestinian people by Jewish Israelis is both the result of and the cause of a decades-long occupation.
Journalist Younis Tirawi posted on X that Israeli soldiers sprayed the words “Death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right” on the walls of Gaza’s cancer hospital, which has been turned into a military base. Meir Kahane, the American-born Orthodox rabbi and leader of the racist Kach movement, was at one time banned from running for the Knesset on the grounds that he headed a racist party, but he has since been rehabilitated.
What do these messages of hate mean? Our enemy has been able to inflict unspeakable horrors on us…shredding our children, shackling and disappearing our people, and starving us all. Israeli soldiers are flaunting their “invincibility,” their entitlement, their sense of their own superiority. In doing so, they display an astonishing level of perversity. So does their adoring public, for whose entertainment they boast of their exploits on X and TikTok.
BUT WE ARE STILL HERE
Yet here I am now, in the north, wiping away their cartoonish displays of power with my own hands. Their words have failed to subjugate us. We have not been defeated. Our response to Israel’s criminal assault is not with words, but with perseverance. Despite everything we have lost, we are moving forward with our lives. I speak not just for myself but for all Palestinians. We will resurrect our homes and our lives and in so doing we say, “Despite your attempts to annihilate us, we will never give up!” And this is not just a slogan—it is a promise, a reality we live every day.
Yes, Israel is still a daunting, fierce enemy, armed to the teeth. And we are of course scared. We have lost so much. Death and starvation are still part of our daily life. Israel’s cruelty is everywhere and it will take years to erase the words of hatred on Gaza’s walls, to heal the physical scars of brandings on Palestinian bodies. We will not be cowed and we will not back down. That is our secret weapon. Our walls will be rebuilt and Palestine will remain alive in the hearts of its people, because we are stronger than any attempt at erasure. And no matter how much Israel tries to etch its dominance into Gaza’s walls—and its people—we will always tell our one true story: one of resilience against brutality, an abiding will to live, and a refusal to leave our homeland.
Farida Algoul is an English teacher and interpreter. Her family was displaced to Gaza in 1967. She is training with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers.
