I thought I could finally exhale.
For two years, I’ve woken up to explosions. To headlines soaked in blood, to faces I didn’t know but loved anyway.
So when I heard the word ceasefire, I thought maybe, just maybe, Gaza could breathe again.
I thought this meant the bombs had stopped.
That children could sleep.
That we could start talking about rebuilding instead of burying.
But then I saw his name.
Saleh.
The voice I clung to for two years. Gone.
The man who showed us Gaza’s heartbreak and still managed to smile through it.
The one who made us believe that as long as they were alive, Gaza was alive too.
That somehow, amid the ruins, there was still light.
And now that light is gone.
Saleh, who laughed even when his hands shook from exhaustion.
Saleh, who filmed rubble and called it resilience.
The same Saleh, Gone.
He didn’t just report from Gaza. He carried it.
And I can’t stop thinking. What do we do when the people who gave us hope are the ones being buried?
I used to feel relief when I saw his face in my feed. A silent promise that Gaza still had a heartbeat.
That we’d rebuild. That this wouldn’t be the end.
But now, that smile has been snuffed out.
That voice silenced.
And this so called ceasefire?
It’s not peace. It’s a curtain.
A pause long enough for the world to look away.
A silence loud enough to hide the killing that never stopped.
They say it’s over but the air is still heavy with ash.
The hospitals are still collapsing. The graves are still open.
This isn’t a ceasefire.
It’s a slaughter, untelevised.
Because when every journalist is dead,
when every camera is broken,
who’s left to tell us what’s happening?
It took two years to kill Gaza’s witnesses.
The ones who dared to keep it alive through words, through footage, through faith.
And now, they’re killing it’s memory too. I thought we’d be rebuilding by now.
But what’s left to rebuild?
The homes are dust. The schools are ash.
The hands that would have rebuilt Gaza now lie beneath it’s rubble.
And I keep whispering their names like prayers, as if saying them out loud might bring them back, might bring Gaza back.
But all I hear is silence. And in that silence, I realise. This isn’t the end of war.
It’s the end of witness.
They call it a ceasefire.
But it’s just the quiet sound of Gaza dying with no one left to film it.
And If the cameras are gone, we have to be the witnesses now.
If their voices are buried, then ours must rise. Because if the journalists are gone, the world’s last light on Gaza is us.
For the voices that once gave us hope,
Hafsa
