Rami Abou Jamous has been keeping a diary for Orient XXI since February 2024. He is the founder of Gaza Press, an agency which provided assistance and interpreting for western correspondents, but in October 2023 he had to leave his apartment in Gaza City with his wife Sabah, her children and their three-year old son Walid under threat of the Israeli army. They sought refuge in Rafah, then in Deir el-Balah and later in Nusseirat. After another move caused by Israel’s violation of the cease-fire on 18 March 2025, Rami and his family returned home on 8 October 2025.
Wednesday 29 October 2025
We’ve been lucky. After the cease-fire was announced on 9 October 2024, we returned home to our apartment on Charles de Gaulle street. It was still undamaged. In our neighbourhood, Rimal, some tower blocks have been destroyed, but not ours. The same can’t be said of other Gaza neighbourhoods.
Up north, the Shati’ refugee camp and the Sheikh Radwan district have been completely flattened. From our neighbourhood` today, we can see the hills of Israel whereas before the view was obstructed by the profusion of buildings. To the south of us, the Tal el-Hawa district no longer exists. It’s as if a huge earthquake had leveled everything.
A lot of people ask me what our lives are like since the ceasefire. Are people beginning to breathe again ? I always answer with the same comparison : we are like a wounded person waking up after an operation. He emerges slowly from the fog of the anaesthesia. He doesn’t feel the pain yet. He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know how badly wounded he is. If he ’ll be able to stand up. Or able to walk again.
So that’s where we’re at. We were trapped in a blender, in a spinning tornado. The blender suddenly stopped. The tornado collapsed. But we are still spinning. Are we able to stand up ? Is the ground revolving around us ? Or is it our heads that are rotating ? We’re out of the war, but the war isn’t out of us. If a car drives by, I imagine it’s a missile crashing down. I still have the buzz of the drones in my ears, the sirens of the ambulances, the scream of the F-16s, the blast of the bombs.
And then we discover our wounds. Sabah asked me if the graveyard where her father was buried is still undamaged. It is in the red zone, which the Israeli army has declared off-limits. Sabah fears that the Israelis have desecrated it, as they have done with other Gaza graveyards. If so, she would bury her father again properly. She is experiencing the sadness of his death all over again.
Many Gazans are going through the same thing, trying to find the bodies of their dead. Like a man I met, whose whole family were killed in a bombing and are still under the rubble. Everybody is concerned about the remains of the Israeli captives, also buried after the bombings. Israel is deploying spectacular means to find them, the army has brought in construction equipment, excavators, especially in Rafah and the east of the Gaza Strip. But the Israelis have refused to let in the machinery to dig up the thousands of Palestinian corpses which their loved ones are not allowed to bury decently.
People also ask me if the humanitarian aid is coming in again. And it is true that lorry-loads of food are again coming into Gaza. But as I write, the reality is as follows: the Israelis let in an average of 300 lorries per day. Which is not nearly enough. And besides, most of those lorries belong to the private sector, to Palestinian retailers, handpicked by the Israeli army. They are not carrying free “humanitarian aid”, but goods to be sold on the markets at very high prices. Over the last few months, nothing was available.
Today, we can find just about everything but very few people can afford them, not only because of the prices but because people have no money. Prices are starting to go down, but they are still too steep. The whole population of Gaza has sunk into poverty. The children see apples and bananas on the stalls but their parents can’t afford them. I’ve seen a whole family sharing a single apple. Foodstuffs are even more expensive in Gaza City. Which is why many city-dwellers who went south haven’t come back yet.
And they have another reason to postpone their return: they also know they’ll have a hard time finding water. In Gaza, most of the wells and pipelines have been destroyed. In many places, there is no water available. And I’m not talking about drinking water, which has practically disappeared, but the water used for everything but drinking.
Actually, the “capital” of the Gaza strip has been moved to Deir el-Balah in the centre of the enclave. This town has become the economic capital and it is there that nearly all the international NGOs are located now. Because Deir el-Balah is the town that has been the least affected by the war. It was not invaded by Israeli ground troops, and it is there that most of the food warehouses are located and other goods sold in the south, where most of the population has gone and where transport costs are lowest. However, there is still a cruel lack of protein. Meat and chicken were allowed in two or three times, but it’s still not nearly enough and the prices are beyond the means of most people: between fifty and one hundred times the normal prices.
All Gazans do their cooking over a wood fire. But wood is getting scarce. You see people looking among the ruins for scraps of it to sell. A kilo goes for between 8 and 10 shekels ($2.30 - $3.00) according to the kind of wood - whether pieces of furniture or whatever. We use anything that burns to heat our clay ovens. Sabah often has her face blackened by the smoke. I always tease her about the contrast between the black of the smoke and the pink of her cheeks. Unfortunately she suffers from asthma, so every time she uses the oven she also has to use her inhaler.
The power has been cut off all over the Gaza Strip. Hospitals and NGOs have generators. We are beginning to see the generators that existed before the war reappearing. Since already at that time we had only eight hours of power a day, in each neighbourhood there was a big generator purchased by some businessman who sold electricity for 4 shekels ($1.25) the kilowatt. Today it costs ten times as much so few people can afford it. One of our neighbours in the building has installed his own generator. We use it from time to time to pump water. For the first time since my return in January 2025, when we open the tap, water comes out! Not all the time, of course, but that’s already something. I no longer have to break my back every day carrying jerrycans up nine flights.
We can also run the lift for a quarter of an hour, twice a day, morning and evening. Unfortunately, since I go out early in the morning and come back late at night, that doesn’t work for me. But at least it’s a relief for the people living in the building who have heavy things to bring up.
This semblance of normality leaves us time to understand the magnitude of what we’ve been living through these last two years of massacres. We are trying to take the measure of the catastrophe, of the depth of our wounds and of our sorrow. We speak of the future and realise that it does not exist. I said to Sabah that at four, Walid was old enough to go to nursery school and that I was ready to enrol him so he would begin understand what school is all about. I try to teach him things by playing with him, but it’s not my profession, I’m not a teacher. I really wish he could go to school, with a satchel, and start his life as a pupil, then a student.
But right away I realized it was impossible, there are no more schools, elementary or secondary, no more universities. For higher education, there are a few universities providing on-line classes, but it’s mostly to pay their professors and other personnel. I don’t see how, in such conditions, we can train scientists, engineers, architects, doctors, dentists with nothing but remote internet classes.
Nonetheless, some things are gradually falling back into place. The Hamas government has more or less resumed its activities. The Ministry of Interior has reopened its registry office, for birth and death certificates. The religious courts can again record marriages. The police are patrolling the streets. They restore order in the markets, which were chaotic. Life seems to be returning. But mostly we are discovering non-life.
There is no longer any life in Gaza, no universities, no infrastructure, no kindergartens. Most of the roads are blocked and most neighbourhoods are unrecognizable, reduced to piles of rubble. Social relations have shrunk to a bare minimum. The main mood is one of instability, uncertainty and fear. Our daily life is punctuated by the declarations of Israel’s rulers: “We’re going to continue the war, punish Gaza, divide the Strip in half, or else make a Western Gaza, and an Eastern Gaza and a Northern Gaza...”. In the night of 28-29 October, the bombings of the whole Gaza strip left over a hundred dead, then the army declared that the ceasefire had been re-established.
For Israel it wasn’t a question of reacting to the death of one of their soldiers in Rafah but of maintaining a feeling of uncertainty among Palestinians. Of showing them anything can happen any time. Netanyahu’s strategy is to keep Gaza in a state of non-peace and of non-war. All of this plays on the nerves of the inhabitants who live in a permanent state of anxiety that serves the purposes of Israel which are always the same: get rid of the Gazans. Drive them to “leave voluntarily”, an expression which will enable them to claim that the Gazans were not expelled.
We’re expecting the Rafah terminal on the Egyptian border to be opened soon. If that happens, many of my friends want to leave. But I have many others who have already gone to Egypt and who want to come back, especially those whose homes haven’t been destroyed. They left at the start of the war, believing it would only last a couple of months or so. After two years, they are completely broke. But that doesn’t discourage those who want to leave. They’re thinking of their children, they’re hoping to offer them a real education and better health care. And above all, a stable life. But Trump, the West and Israel keep waving the spectre of Hamas at us. They say they’re going to build a Gaza without Hamas. Yet they know that Hamas is everywhere, that its part of the population. Claiming that you’re going to do something without Hamas is to say you’re going to do it, but without the people.
That is their plan and they’re carrying it out : Trump’s “Riviera”, Gaza is going to become a kind of international entity, run by internationals, with a few Palestinians who’ll still be living here. Instead of doing it with bombs they’ll do it quietly with this non-life, this instability, this anxiety. The patient isn’t quite conscious yet after the operation, doesn’t yet know if he’ll stand up right away or how long it will take to get well. He doesn’t know exactly what the surgeon did or how bad his wounds are. His present is obscure, his future unknown, and he can only think of the past.
Translated by Noël Burch
