Gaza Diary: “My heart wants to believe in it”

I I’m tired of waiting. I have enough incorrect hopes that give us every day. Again and again they promise that the war will end soon, that the ceasefire is inevitable. I cling to these promises, as a sinking person, a straw. I say to myself: hold on, survive, it will not take much time. But the days pass and nothing changes.

We live with the news about a possible ceasefire within a week. Rumors of only the “preliminary agreement” were enough to place the whole street in Gas in the riots. Joy and hope slowly returned to the exhausted faces of people. Product prices that previously even exceeded prices in Paris suddenly fell a little. One kilogram of flour again became affordable, and they disappeared from the markets again. We were fooled for a short moment.

But this fragile joy quickly evaporated. The negotiations stalled again, and rising prices returned.

I still remember very well this Thursday, when Hamas announced his preliminary approval of the ceasefire agreement. Suddenly, the streets were full of applause calls and applause. I saw how the children walked between the tents and shouted with joy. At night it was felt on the street, as if the oath was marked. There are rumors that the US President “Trump will announce the ceasefire next Monday.” My heart wanted to believe it. I was so tired of everything that happened, and I wanted to believe that I would survive – that I could finally sleep, I would not wake the explosion.

Disappointment came at night

But from this moment, the pace of bombing is terribly applied. We started, as if we were in the race to death, we were afraid of every moment, every sound of the aircraft, every earthquake on Earth. I joined the tent and tried to go as little as possible – not only out of fear of the bombs, but also because I felt that I had exhausted all my strength.

Monday came, and my heart hesitated between hope and fear. We sat there all day and waited for the news, watched every word and rumors, like someone, who was waiting for the final judgment about his life. But the day came to an end, and Trump announced the ceasefire. Darkness burst along with a new disappointment, which we added to a long list of defeats.

People began to whisper again: “Maybe Thursday … maybe Friday …”, but we know very well what it means “maybe” means here. More dead, more destruction, more victims, more hunger, which growls in our stomachs. People became like perfumes that walk along the streets, with heavy steps, empty eyes and hearts that are exhausted by expectation.

Even if the ceasefire comes, what will change? We no longer have houses that we can return to, and the murder will not stop. And yet I am desperately eager for this. I want to take a deep breath, charge your batteries before this hell begins again. I would like to see what happened to the grave of my father, which we had to leave in Beit -lahia a month ago – is it still there or was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers?

Like in the game Squid

All that we experience today gives me the feeling that I was a figure in the game Squid. We are fighting for survival, encounter unknown problems and do not know whether we raise it alive or conducted like corpses. You can be killed here because you are fighting for food, because you protect your family or just try to avoid death. There is no guarantee of survival, no safe streets – just luck can give you another day.

I don’t know if I will be here tomorrow to read these words. I only know that I hope that the ceasefire will appear – not because it will restore everything that we have lost, but because it can give us a chance to get air, the opportunity to say our exhausted souls: “Hold on, there is still hope.”

23 -year -old Seham Tantesh from Beit Lahia, the cousin of our reporter Malak Tantesh and was expelled eight times.

International journalists could not go to a series of gas since the beginning of the war and from there. In the “Gaza Diary” we get voices in place.