Sara Roy
The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future.
The Sheikh Radwan rainwater basin, Gaza City,
On Friday, October 10, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, I heard from a Palestinian friend in the Strip. Gaza had been celebrating since the news broke, but grief was never far away. “Our feelings are mixed,” he wrote:
Yes, we are relieved that the genocide has stopped, even though we remain uncertain about what lies ahead…. I think of the families whose children are still buried under the rubble. I think of the mother who doesn’t know where her son is, the father who hasn’t yet been able to even see his children’s bodies. It will take us a long time to tell the untold stories.
By then conditions had deteriorated to a point “beyond human imagination,” as another friend in Gaza put it to me near the end of June. The bombing had hardly let up for months; food had run out or was outrageously unaffordable; prices for transit were soaring. Many Palestinians in the Strip were risking their lives to secure aid from the notorious distribution centers run by the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. In early October Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that Israeli forces had killed over 2,500 aid seekers and injured nearly 19,000 in barely more than four months. “They tell us that there is aid today, and when [people] arrive, they are shot,” said the friend who wrote me this summer. “And so every day, massacre after massacre…. If they could take the air away from us, they would.”
Since the start of Israel’s devastating campaign, according to the health ministry, over 68,000 men, women, and children in the Strip have been killed and over 170,000 injured. As of May 2025 that death toll included more than 2,180 families that have been entirely annihilated, erased from Gaza’s civil registry; more than 5,070 have only one surviving member. Those are the official statistics, which include only reported deaths compiled by hospitals and morgues and caused by Israeli military action. They are, without question, gross underestimates. Between ten and fifteen thousand additional people are presumed buried under the rubble of their homes—also considered a dramatic undercount, both because wartime conditions impede data collection and because the killing of so many entire families has left no one to report. The spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Olga Cherevko, said in a September briefing that “the unmistakable smell of death is everywhere—a grisly reminder that the ruins lining the streets hide the remains of mothers, fathers, and children…their lives cut short by the war’s killing machines, many to never be found again.” Legal experts, not to mention the testimony of our own eyes, tell us that this can only be termed a genocide.
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