On a cold morning in central Gaza City, Nevin Al-Barbari, 35, sat in what remained of her family home, watching her two-year-old daughter, Reem, explore the rooms she had only recently come to know.

A repost from 9 October 2025

Outside, Israeli tanks rumbled two kilometres away. Al-Barbari had refused to leave, despite evacuation orders from Defence Minister Israel Katz, who had declared that anyone remaining in the city would be considered a terrorist or a supporter of terrorism. “We are civilians tired of displacement,” she said, her voice quiet but firm, “and he can confirm that.”

For Al-Barbari, as for hundreds of thousands of Gazans, the question of whether to support or oppose the peace plan that President Donald Trump unveiled last week has become inseparable from the question of survival itself. The plan — announced with backing from Arab and European Governments — calls for an immediate ceasefire, the entry of humanitarian aid, a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the transfer of Gaza’s administration to an international peacekeeping committee led by Trump and former British prime minister Tony Blair. It arrived after nearly two full years of war, after the destruction of much of Gaza’s infrastructure, after tens of thousands of deaths, and after a pattern of ceasefires that offered brief respite only to collapse into renewed violence.

Since 7 October 2023, when the war began, Gazans had imagined it would last a month, perhaps slightly longer, as previous conflicts had. Instead, it intensified with extraordinary ferocity. Entire neighbourhoods were levelled. Civilians were systematically displaced from their homes and forced into tent encampments. The war evolved from bombardment and displacement into a slower, grinding deprivation: hunger, thirst, the absence of medicine. Each ceasefire — two weeks here, 40 days there — proved insufficient to restore what had been lost, insufficient even to allow people to catch their breath.

When Trump assumed office in January 2025, many in Gaza placed their hopes on him. They believed he possessed the leverage necessary to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt the offensive. And for a time, it seemed they were right: Trump brokered a ceasefire that lasted nearly 40 days. But when it ended, the war resumed with a violence that felt almost retaliatory. The crossings were sealed. Food, water and medicine were blocked from entering the Gaza Strip. Those who had dared to hope found themselves thrust back into a reality........

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