For Gaza’s 2 million survivors, the word “ceasefire” no longer sounds like peace; it sounds like a trick of language, another fragile pause between massacres. After two years of genocide that erased entire families, neighborhoods, and futures, many in Gaza met this fragile truce not with celebration but disbelief, exhaustion, and fear. One Palestinian described the current moment as a “pause between two pains”: the horror they lived through and the uncertainty that has followed.

I spoke with six people from Gaza — a filmmaker, a photojournalist, an architect, a former spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, a civil worker, and a survivor — who offer a piercing look into what it means to first live through a genocide and then to try to live through its aftermath. Their words reveal a haunting truth: The war may have paused, but it doesn’t feel truly over.

“No Triumph in Surviving”

Hala Asfour, a 24-year-old filmmaker and photographer, said her initial reaction to the ceasefire was pure disbelief. “I didn’t feel joy,” she says. “Just this heavy, oppressive feeling, like my heart couldn’t absorb what had happened. I feel a great void. Even a week later, I still see the war everywhere: in people’s faces, in the children, in the echo of planes and drones that will never leave my memory.” For Asfour, this ceasefire is a pause, not peace. She calls it a “pause between two pains,” the agony of the genocide they endured and the suffering that continues in its aftermath.

“I still see the war everywhere: in people’s faces, in the children, in the echo of planes and drones.”

Fear is now part of her body, she says, and escaping it seems impossible. “Fear is something I breathe. It’s inside me. Every loud sound, every plane, every buzz — it takes me back to that first explosion of the war. Safety? I don’t feel it at all,” she says. She thinks this ceasefire is a pause that feels like the calm before the storm. She and the people of Gaza lived through many truces before, only to have new, more devastating attacks follow.

For Hala, the war stole much more than homes. It stole her life, herself, her friends, her colleagues, the familiar streets, and everything that looked like her. Hala also lost her fiancé, the Palestinian journalist Mohammad Salama, an Al Jazeera camera operator, in a “double-tap” Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on August 25, 2025, that also killed five other journalists.

“My wish now is to have one normal day.”

“What I miss most is reassurance,” she says. “The simple feeling of waking up and knowing where your day will go. My wish now is to have one normal day.” This genocide shattered Hala into fragments: a girl who once dreamed and a woman who now struggles to survive.

In Gaza, living becomes the harder choice, more complicated than death itself. “There’s no triumph in surviving. It’s a different kind of pain,” Hala reflects. “You wake up every day carrying the guilt of still being alive when others—people you loved—are gone and didn’t make it till the end. We survived to tell their stories, to honor them, but survival isn’t a privilege.” Slowly, she is learning to breathe again. “Life feels fragmented, but with each child’s laugh, with every sunrise piercing the ruins, we inch toward the possibility of breathing—just a little. Not because we are OK, but because we have to try,” she says.

“I Take More Photos Now Than During the War Itself”

For Anas Zayed Fteiha, a 31-year-old photojournalist with Anadolu Agency, the ceasefire has meant returning to work to document the aftermath of destruction. (Fteiha is currently pursuing legal action against the global publishing company Axel Springer, which he has accused of violating his constitutional........

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