Akram al-Sourani: A year after the ceasefire Gaza has no privacy, no peace and thirty people to a room, water queues every morning while the drones keep buzzing
No peace and thirty people to a room, water queues every morning while the drones keep buzzing
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Two girls walk past collapsed buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 August 2026. Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images
theguardian.com
Akram Al-Sourani
theguardian.com
One year after the ceasefire was announced, Akram al-Sourani writes from Gaza that the sounds of bombardment, explosions and surveillance drones have not stopped. He and his neighbours queue for water every morning. Thirty people are crammed into the single room where he lives; his family lives in a tent. Washing one's face, drinking clean water and taking a hot shower have become impossible or severely restricted, and people wait in queues to use the toilet.
Al-Sourani's account is anchored in the specific. On the morning of Friday 13 October 2023, evacuation leaflets dropped from the sky ordered residents to leave their homes and head south. His family left northern Gaza, abandoning a home he can still itemise: the stairwell, the curtains, the windows, the sofas, the router, a 55-inch television, a pressure cooker on the stove, unwashed dishes, and half a lemon kept in the fridge door. They have never returned. The war, he writes, has changed residents psychologically so that they no longer recognise themselves — the people they were before are gone.
The piece documents what 'peace' has meant on the ground. The ceasefire froze the destruction without unfreezing any solution: fuel shortages, repeated border closures and only a trickle of supplies mean his children walk long distances to what remains of their school because transport is difficult and expensive — risking bombardment on the way. In Gaza, he writes, one must check each morning that the place where you slept is still somewhere you can spend the following night. Obtaining a loaf of bread, an education or medical treatment is no longer an ordinary matter.