AN ICONIC IMAGE OF BRAVERY AND DETERMINATION

  

ON JANUARY 19, 2025, the Gaza ceasefire came into effect in the war between Israel and Hamas, and is scheduled to last six weeks. I say it is a war between Israel and the Hamas militia, but really, it’s between Israel and the Palestinian people. For over fifteen months the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bombed and shelled almost the entire civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip—homes, civic buildings, schools, hospitals, farmlands—leaving behind a moonscape of destruction,  with Gazan towns and cities looking like the aftermath of a nuclear attack. There would be virtually no clean water or sewage facilities; medical services were gravely disrupted as hospital after hospital was systematically destroyed. Food supplies from the outside world were blockaded by Israeli border patrols and starvation became a real threat for hundreds of thousands. It was a genocide and ethnic cleansing we all  watched daily on our screens.

BOTH the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are currently adjudicating to determine, in international law, whether Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people of Gaza met the legal definition of a genocide. But the daily butchering of innocent civilians—many are women and children—continued at pace until the January 19 ceasefire. With food and medical supplies now allowed into the enclave and travel restrictions lifted during the six-week ceasefire, this iconic picture of hundreds of thousands of Gazans returning to their homes in the central and northern reaches of the Strip will long be seen as a symbol of a people determined to persevere against all odds.

They travel from the south where nearly two million had been forced into overcrowded refugee camps. They crossed the newly created Netzarim Corridor, an Israeli security zone bisecting the Strip and marched north in their thousands. That they would find their homes and neighbourhoods in rubble, did not deter them from seeking out the places that were theirs. In this moment, at this time, before the inevitable bombing begins again, Palestinians are victorious.

 

Cheers, Jake