The enablers of Gaza's hell can't now pose as its saviours

On Monday, Sharm el-Sheikh played host to the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years.

- Nesrine Malik

Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others met “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability”.

If the ceasefire holds, this language is an augur of the future. One where there is no reckoning, no addressing of root causes. Only a hurtling into the imperatives of cleanings-up and workings-out. All the while illegal occupation continues, and another chapter of Israel’s violations is furtively closed without accountability.

There is an Arabic expression, hameeha harameeha - meaning “its protector is its thief” - that comes to mind as those who have plied Israel with weaponry gather to figure out how to achieve peace in Gaza. Over the coming weeks and months, a Gaza even more devastated than what has been shown to the world so far will come into view. Already the colossal scale of what needs to be rebuilt is becoming clear. People are returning to their homes in Gaza City to find a wasteland flattened to the horizon. A home returned to is just a plot on which to pitch another tent and wait for aid.

People in Gaza have been released from the fear of death, but what of the life they now face? What of the thousands of orphans? It is not just the infrastructure of large parts of Gaza that has been destroyed, it is also the social fabric. How to even begin to think about addressing such mass trauma when there isn’t even a roof to gather under?