On January 16 this year, following months of mediation by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, a ceasefire deal emerged to put a stop to the 15-month genocidal assault launched by Israel on Gaza after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. After initial delays by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, the deal was formally approved on January 17.

The deal entails three stages, starting with an initial six-week ceasefire, during which Hamas is to release a total of 33 hostages (including women, children and elderly and sick men) at regular intervals, while Israel committed to releasing 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.

In addition to this exchange, the first phase of the ceasefire requires that Israeli forces leave populated areas in Gaza to allow displaced Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. Moreover, each day, hundreds of aid lorries are to be allowed into Gaza.

The second stage of the deal is expected to include the release of all hostages, a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. Talks on the second phase of the ceasefire have reportedly started on February 4.

The third stage will see the return of all remaining dead bodies as well as the start of the reconstruction of Gaza, supervised by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations, which is expected to take years. After that, the Palestinians, Arab states and Israel will have to reach a consensus for postwar Gaza, including who will run the Strip following the end of the war.

Gaza is home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians. The majority of these people have had to flee their homes during the 15-month siege as Israel carried out its military offensive in the territory. After the ceasefire deal was announced, hundreds of thousands of people began returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip. In many cases, there is nothing left for them to return to.

I spoke to award-winning Palestinian photojournalist Eman Mohammed about the situation that many in Gaza are facing. “Friends and family are blown away, in a very negative way, just shocked by the mass destruction,” she said. “They say that it looks nothing like the photos, that it’s 1,000 times more. The situation is so dire that it’s so hard to find water, it’s so hard to find food.”

Amid such devastation, the housing situation is not the only concern. People have to worry about not getting injured or sick as the only remaining operating hospitals are in the south, impossible to reach without a car and with the current state of highway roads, which the Israeli military has destroyed. Parents are also eager to send their kids back to school, which is proving difficult.

“They sent Gaza to the Stone Age deliberately,” Eman said. “But the hardest thing I’m finding is people dealing with the heartbreak, with the absence of those who were supposed to be reunited with loved ones. Fathers that had been killed and their children had been stuck in the south. We’re hearing so many stories. We have a lot of friends who are dealing with this situation.”

Speaking about the current situation, Chair of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), Zoë Lawlor, said: “People are looking for their loved ones under the rubble. Some people can’t recover the bodies because they don’t know where they are. Just, the loss is so huge for everybody there.”

Another issue that we’re witnessing now with the exchange of hostages in the ceasefire deal is that many of the Palestinians detained by Israel were under what is called “administrative detention”. This is a procedure that allows Israel to detain people indefinitely without charges, a practice that has been widely criticised by human rights groups. There are reportedly over 3,000 people held under administrative detention by Israel, and officials keep arresting people even during the ceasefire.

“They are just taken, put in these prisons, and that’s why they are hostages, not prisoners, because there is no due process,” Eman said. “There are no lawyers. There’s no law that says you can hold them. There’s no logic legally behind taking them, with the exception of holding them as a bargain like hostages are.

“So that’s why I am pretty adamant about using those terms, because when you look like a hostage, you are a hostage.”

Despite the current situation, after months of continuous air strikes, the ceasefire deal was hailed as a victory for the Palestinian people. “I was going to just feel the water with my friends who lost their families. I wanted to see if they are happy because, what is the worth of going back to whatever normal that is if your whole family are gone? And they were happy.

“They were so happy. They felt so victorious in the sense that they felt like they got something in return for all this bloodshed.”

While the Gaza ceasefire is positive news for the Palestinian people, it certainly doesn’t represent an end to the conflict with Israel. Just like the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, wasn’t the start.

“Palestinian resistance did not launch October 7th because they wanted to lift the siege or open the borders,” Eman said. “They wanted liberation. Equality, justice, full human rights. It doesn’t sound crazy when you put it in that perspective. I just want full human rights. Give me full human rights and then consider this crisis averted.

“We’ve been living parts of this genocide. We’ve been living the siege. We’ve been living the air strikes, random air strikes, intensified air strikes known as wars. And it was all ongoing even though it wasn’t a full-blown genocide, even though not 1,000 were getting killed.

“So the fact that Palestinians would stop resisting is not anywhere near in sight. That’s just not gonna happen because the occupation is remaining. We’re aiming for liberation. We’ve been saying that from day one.”

This is why it is so important to keep our eyes open and watch what is still happening in Gaza and what will take place in the next phases of the ceasefire deal. “We’ve seen genuine support from the people,” Eman said. “We have seen it also from Black and Indigenous and queer communities. Any community that had been subjected to injustice in their human rights rose up, and we’ve seen genuine support.”

While people all over the world have shown up in solidarity with Palestine, governments weren’t as quick to condemn Israel and support the people of Gaza. “A lot of governments did not have genuine support, including Ireland. The Irish government is not genuine in its support. The Irish people are, but definitely not the Irish government. We’ve seen that in the slow response, in the hesitancy of putting sanctions.”

The IPSC echoed these words, saying that the international community needs to act now and do “what they should have done all along, which is sanction Israel, expel it from every international organisation, including the United Nations. Isolate it, boycott it, and hold it to account”.

“It’s an apartheid state, that’s currently under investigation for plausible genocide,” Zoë added. “Its prime minister is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, but yet it’s still treated as a normal state.

“The international community has shamed itself, by shredding international law for Israel in this genocide, by not only not sanctioning it, but in many cases, funding, arming, and enabling the genocide to go on.

“Ireland is part of that culture of impunity because the Irish state has not imposed any sanctions on Israel. And we have three pieces of legislation, the Occupied Territories Bill, the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment bill, and the Arms Embargo Bill, and they should enact those immediately.”

In a situation of humanitarian crisis, minority groups are the ones who suffer the most. This is also true for the queer community, which has been widely weaponised in Israeli propaganda.

Eman spoke about how, because of the pinkwashing tactics adopted by Israel, the queer community in Palestine has been brutalised on two fronts. The community is “going through its struggles in Palestine just like any other queer community. Ask any queer community, ‘Have your government been kind to you?’, and they will say no.

“We know the queer community as insiders. We know who’s queer, and we know their struggles on a daily basis. We know the clash between the traditional, conservative concepts and the queer life. But at the same time, they were completely abandoned by the international community. They were weaponised.

“It’s really a disgrace that instead of discussing if the queer community is surviving or dying in Gaza, we’re discussing how the traditions are not nice to them. Sure, they’re not nice to them. In any country, they are not nice. It’s not okay, but I think they would rather live than be brutalised and tokenised.

“It’s hard to be queer in the open in Gaza, and that’s not a secret. But imagine if you tell the occupation that you’re queer. They give no protection. Once they are Palestinians, they will get no protection. They will get annihilated, and that will be weaponised against them.

“Knowing that I have family that are queer, it kills me. Because our hands are not just tied, but the international community just turned its back completely.”

Eman called on people to keep their attention on Gaza and hold Israel and its allies accountable for what was done and what could still happen in the future. While a ceasefire deal has been agreed upon, this doesn’t mean that the conflict in Gaza is over and people who showed up in solidarity with Palestine need to stay alert. Eman said: “We would just urge them to not fall into the Israeli propaganda, assuming that it’s over because it’s not, and to keep an eye on what is happening.”