Reportage
When the war ends, peace doesn’t start
The end of the war in Gaza is not a victory; it is a painful awakening. We open our eyes to the scale of our loss and re-learn how to live without the things we once lived for.
When the bombs stop falling, the world assumes the war is over and calls it peace. But in Gaza, the silence that follows the bombardment is not peace; it is the beginning of a confrontation with real pain. A ceasefire isn't the end. It simply means the noise has subsided, allowing the voice of grief to be heard.
The moment calm is declared, memory begins to speak. The father who lost his son wakes every morning to his image. The woman who said goodbye to her martyred husband learns to speak to absence itself. The child who survived carries in his eyes the memory of a home turned to ash.
The end of the war in Gaza is not a victory; it is a painful awakening. We open our eyes to the scale of our loss and re-learn how to live without the things we once lived for. Destroyed homes are not easily rebuilt in the heart, and vanished faces cannot be replaced by silence or the promise of reconstruction. This fragile quiet that hangs over the ruins is the space where the people of Gaza confront themselves, discovering that survival is not a comfort, but a new responsibility. To live after all this means to carry the pain of those who did not make it.
So when the fire dies down, it is not peace that begins, but words. Words from grieving hearts, heavy memories, and people searching for a path forward in a city exhausted by loss. In Gaza, the end of the war is not the end – it is the beginning of another chapter of silent suffering, no less painful than the bombs.
Reconstruction does not begin with bricks, but with hearts. Houses can be rebuilt, but who can rebuild the human beings who lived inside them? How can a mother, who still trembles at the sound of the wind because it reminds her of explosions, ever feel safe again? In Gaza, people are mending not only walls, but souls shattered by incessant fear.
And the children are a story without end. They have learned to count by the sound of rockets instead of the numbers in their schoolbooks, and they understood absence before they could ever understand a future. Every night, a parent sits beside them, promising that life will one day smile again, but their own eyes reveal what cannot be put into words: the fear that their children will grow up believing war is what is normal.
In the morning after the war, the coffee no longer has its familiar aroma; the air is thick with dust and ash. People walk slowly, bread in hand, the weight of memory in their hearts. They stop before the ruins of their homes, touching the stones as if they were the faces of their loved ones, pulling photos from the rubble as if gathering the fragments of their own hearts.
And in the evening, the silence is not tranquil, but full of the hidden clamor of questions and pain. Every closed window whispers a story; every ruined street holds the echo of footsteps that will never return. In this silence, souls speak more loudly than people ever could.
“The war is over,” they said. But in the heart, it is never over. After the world falls silent, the voice of pain arises – at first a whisper, then clear, as if coming from the depths. A mother sits on the threshold of her ruined home, staring down the street where her son used to walk home every evening. She once recognized the sound of his footsteps before she could even see him; now, every footstep she hears triggers the false hope that he has returned. She clutches the small clothes she found in the rubble, pressing them to her chest as if trying to draw the warmth of life back from the ashes. The world is silent, but inside her rages a war that will never cease: a war between memory and forgetting, between love and loss.
In another house, a young woman sits by a door that has not been opened since her man left. Her last promise to him was that she’d wait for him after the war. But now the war is over, and everything is back to how it was, except for him. Every night she talks to his photograph, asking about his day, telling him about the city that feels strange without his voice. She is learning that absence does not heal, and that loneliness is not emptiness, but the presence of a loved one only in memory. She did not lose him just once when he was martyred; she loses him again every day when she wakes up and he isn’t there.
The child who survived alone now carries in his eyes the burden of an age far beyond his years. People ask for his name, but he remains silent, as if names no longer have meaning after all the voices that once called to him have vanished. He walks the ruined streets, searching for a familiar face, a hand to hold, an embrace to restore his sense of safety. Sometimes he plays among the rubble, but every laugh carries with it a splinter of pain. He rarely cries, perhaps because tears are no longer enough for what he feels inside.
Yes, the war is over. But it has not left their hearts. It still lives there, in the little everyday things, in their gazes, in the long silence before they fall asleep. In Gaza, war does not end with a ceasefire; it lingers behind every broken smile, every heart trying to relearn how to live after losing life itself.
I remember the first ceasefire, announced in January 2025. People poured into the streets to celebrate, cheering and raising their voices in joy. But I wept. And my tears didn’t come from relief, but from a feeling of oppression.
I did not feel that the war was over; I felt it was beginning again inside me. I saw in people’s eyes a hope I could not reach, remembering my old home and my family wiped from existence, remembering everything in my life that had stopped, as if time itself had frozen in that first moment of loss. As their voices rose in celebration, I felt only the heavy silence hanging over the ruins of my inner world. That silence cannot be described. And you cannot say, “The war is over,” because we know it is not.
And yet, I continue to believe that the same heart that has wept in deep anguish is capable of rising from the rubble. In Gaza, the pain never completely ends, but it learns to coexist with life. We carry our pain with us not as a burden, but as proof that we are still alive.
We look at the sky, still shrouded in smoke, and whisper to ourselves: we will rebuild. Not only what was destroyed around us, but also what was broken within us. True peace, for us, is not when the bombs stop falling. It means the day we’ll be able to smile without being afraid of our memories.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/quando-finisce-la-guerra-non-inizia-la-pace-ma-il-silenzio on 2025-10-10