Blessed silence.. a soundtrack of hope that dares to promise a better tomorrow

Finally, Gazans can start rebuilding broken lives

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THE hush glows like sunshine on newly fallen snow, silence as a soundtrack of hope, quiet resonating across the ruined Gazan hellscape like the most soothing music any living soul has known.

Listen, cup an ear to the sky...no bombs, no bullets, no death chorus playing on a terrible repeat loop.

In its place, the birdsong of ceasefire. The heavenly concert of hostilities suspended.

Peace - however fragile, though it cannot erase the inhuman slaughter that has stilled almost 70,000 hearts, and while it will not miracle into existence the vitamin of mutual trust - is planting the seed of a better tomorrow in the soil of the psyche.

For today, that silence is everything. Precious and beautiful and, amid the jetsam of destruction, a raft to which a drowning people can cling.

The children of Palestine are required to search long and hard in the drawers of memory to recall such a time: days before fear was so stalking and ever-present that it became a form of grief; nights without terror's forbidding outline as a constant bedfellow.

After two years sinking in the quicksand of hopelessness, mothers can anticipate the first foundation stones of a bridge over the cloying swamp, eventually yielding a pathway that might yet offer their offspring a route to a life beyond 24/7 horror.

A portal to a better place. An escape hatch from Armageddon. A gangway to some kind of normalcy.

Gaza remains a land of starvation and broken buildings, of sundered, emaciated families, an acreage where the catastrophic storm damage inflicted on the psyche of two million souls will not be easily mended.

For the longest time they will be forced to chew on the cud of terrible memories, wincing at the stomach-churning taste of all those diabolical yesterdays.

TOXIC