Throughline - Four Seasons of Ceasefire in Gaza

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

NPR’s Anas Baba is one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza working full-time for an American news organization. A year into the ceasefire, more than 1400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks, nearly 5,000 injured. And those numbers rise nearly every day. What has the last year looked and felt like on the ground? In this episode, Baba takes us through four seasons of ceasefire—as both a resident trying to survive and a reporter trying to document reality.Guests:Anas Baba, NPR Gaza reporterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

And as I'm really curious, do you find any kind of joy in a song or a particular piece of music that you go back to even on the hardest days? If you ask me this question before the war, I would go for Tupac. I would go for Mozart. Tupac and Mozart. Those are different vibes. I know, I know. Maybe also I'm going to go for Adele. I adore this woman. But during the war, to be honest, I would rather not to listen to music because they're going to drain the battery. Everything you need to be calculated, even when you want to take a bath, it's something literally like a scientific project.

So I can't. Truly, I can't. So the only Tupac playing is like in your head. Exactly. Most of the time, everything I play in my head. To be honest, the most song that still plays in my head is, I'm not a man who loves like musical movies or musical film, but I watch a musical film when I was like in my 20s.

Lumuz Gable, Lumus Rue. There was a song that still literally plays like shuffle in my head and never stop. Look down, look down, don't look them in the eye. Look down, look time, you're here until you die. Now, prisoners 2,4610, your time is up and your parallel be gone. You know what's that means. It's time to die.

Look down, look down. So this is the song. It's not about the Israelis, actually. I don't look to the eye of the people of Gaza because I feel the pain of them. And they feel always that we're all going to die. This is the reality. This is the only belief that I have in meantime.

That's we're all going to die. This is Ennis Baba. You might recognize him. His voice, his interviews, his photos, have informed NPR's audience for years. Gaza. Andes is one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza, working full-time with an American news organization.

For the last three years, Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza, and more Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza than any war on record ever, says the committee to protect journalists. During the war, your senses, your emotions are all literally about survival. because you know that death is everywhere. But now, which is ceasefire, as they describe it, you need to feel the opposite. But it's not.

October 10, 2025. The war in Gaza is over. A U.S.-backed ceasefire went into effect. It outlined a plan whereby Hamas would release the remaining 48 Israeli hostages captured in the October 7th attacks. Israel would release thousands of Palestinian prisoners, and major military operations would end. The president last night called this the first step

toward a strong, durable, and everlasting peace. Peace in the Middle East. The agreement had three phases. Phase one says that the Israelis are going to take half of Gaza, and the Palestinians are going to have half of Gaza. And the second phase... Israel would withdraw to around 40% of Gaza. Palestinians would control 60%.

And the third phase means disarmament of Hamas. At the same time, Israel would withdraw to 15% of Gaza, until, quote, Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat. And that's the end of the war. Here's what the ceasefire has looked like in Gaza by the numbers, according to Gaza's health ministry. In the almost one year since the announcement of the ceasefire, a dozen journalists killed in Israeli attacks.

More than 1,400 people killed in Israeli attacks, 300 of them children, around 5,000 people wounded in Israeli attacks. And those numbers rise nearly every day. The remaining 2.1 million Palestinians there are being totally crowded and squeezed in only 30% of Gaza. 10% of this 30% are rebels. Day in, day out. NS has reported on every development.

working closely with a team of colleagues at NPR, including fellow Middle East reporters Ayeba Trawi and Daniel Estrin, to get those stories out to the world. Until the moment, most of the families in Gaza, they don't talk about their last, because they are still losing more and more. So it's not past tense. It's still present. Exactly. Exactly. It's not past tense. It's still present tense.

The Israeli military has conducted a series of airstrikes in Gaza. There's no life here. Everything is a struggle. The Trump administration is planning to deliver powerful 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. U.S. taxpayer money would fund most of the sale through foreign military financing. The numbers tell part of the story, a bird's eye view. But what has the last year felt like on the ground? I was surprised that this man every single day takes a chair

and goes to the troubles and the breeze of his house and he starts to tell stories to his children, to his mother, to his wife. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we'll travel through the past four seasons of ceasefire with Ennis Baba, who carries the dual burden of being both a resident trying to survive and a reporter trying to document reality. Stay with us. This is Paul from Baltimore, Maryland, 21218. We're home to the James Webb Space Telescope.

We're not the center of the universe, but you can see it from here. You're listening to Three Line from NPR. Part 1, Fall to Winter. Let's start with the first day of the announcement of the Seas Fair. I was on the street expecting that people are going to go room the streets and they're going to have celebrations everywhere. People are going to be singing. They're going to be happy. But they were not. Leading up to the ceasefire announcement last October, Israeli troops were advancing deeper into Gaza City under government orders to take full control. This is what it sounds like in an area of Gaza City where Israeli soldiers are advancing.

They're encircling this coastal city from the north, east and south. blasting their way through street by street. Israeli airstrikes were toppling high-rise towers in the city, and nearly everyone was forced to evacuate south. NPR's reporter in Gaza City, Anasbaba, documented their arrival to his neighborhood, which itself is now being evacuated. A children's hospital was severely damaged,

according to the World Health Organization and NPR's reporting. Sarvation had taken hold across Gaza, with United Nations-backed experts declaring a famine in Gaza City due to Israeli restrictions on aid. The UN confirms tens of thousands had already been killed in Israeli attacks over the previous two years. Nothing looks the same in Gaza after two years of war. Everywhere you look are mounds of rubble and bomb buildings, but there is one thing here that hasn't changed. The sea. The sea was the same.

On land, nothing was. And getting people to talk, not always easy. People are still afraid of journalists. Once I enter a coffee shop, they came to me politely and they say, Anna's, not for our sake, but for the sake of the people that they are sitting inside, could you just leave the place because you are still a target? So it kind of puts you at odds, it sounds like, with the people around you sometimes. Indeed. Indeed.

And some needed to be convinced that the world was still listening. And they say, I'm a journalist, and I want to hear your voice. I want you to tell the world what happens. So people start to feel, okay, we don't believe about the world anymore. We don't believe about anything. But let's try. At least, we're not going to lose anything. As the days turned into weeks, the still warm October air made way for a brisk November breeze.

First time in months, there is frozen meat and fresh produced like bananas, avocados and bill peppers for sale on the market. Many children are seeing these foods for the first time. Enos tried to piece together what had changed with the ceasefire and what dangers remained. Israeli troops are still positioned deep inside the territory. They are afraid from a bullet. They are afraid from an Israeli tanker till. The ceasefire came into effect. 89 people have been killed by Israeli fire.

The drone is constantly buzzing over the head. You're still hearing those drones always. Yeah, nonstop. Every single day, every single night. A severe storm has unleashed cold wind and heavy rain across Gaza. This is the territory's third winter since the war began, with the recent ceasefire providing only limited relief. By the time winter set in, roughly 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza,

three out of every four people, were still living in tents. many of them, nothing more than plastic sheets on sticks. We are talking about tinsities. People here huddle under flumsy plastic sheets that cannot withstand if it rain or wind. Israel was allowing more aid trucks to enter. Israel said then and says now that aid is flood in Gaza and denies it blocks essentials like shelter supplies. But the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs and other aid groups have been sounding the alarm. They say what's entering is not nearly enough to address the needs of people.

And then came the floods. I can feel it. I can feel the water just dripping in top of me. The daily struggle, he says, to stay warm and make a fire. And if you were lucky, maybe have a cup of tea. What does that actually take to make a cup of tea in Gaza? So making a simple cup of tea in Gaza is a major time. You have to work from the early morning to fetch some clean water. After that, you need to find cardboard and even the papers, sometimes some clothes,

anything that you have, and you just like sit it to burn. Because until the moment the cooking gas is still unavailable, it enters, but it's like, what, five trucks every two days for two million people. It's nothing. You make the tea and you wait around 30 to. 25 minutes just to fix a cup of tea, which, by the way, tastes like rubber, burned rubber. Is there sugar to put in the tea? Yeah, there is sugar, and there is a little bit of sweeteners.

Things that were in short supply before the ceasefire, when many in Gaza lived through famine. Israel was restricting the entry of all food into Gaza, leading to starvation. Ennis estimates he lost almost a third of his body weight during that time. He documented children dying from hunger, and hundreds were killed by Israeli soldiers as they were trying to get food from U.S. supported food distribution sites. But it's not about the sugar of the sweeteners, it's about the hygiene. It's about how you live. How you live, in a place where the water has become undrinkable, where everything you wear is caked in the chalky dust of the gray rubble around you, where the electrical grid and sewage systems collapsed. It smells like a mix of salt water from the sea, rose sewage from the broken infrastructure,

just like flooding the street, generators exhaust, cars exhaust, and dumpsters. All of this mixed with the explosive powders because the air strikes on Gaza never stopped. At night, they huddle together with all the blankets they have to stay warm. If the Israeli didn't not not in the cannabes in the canada

in the snow, we're going to be in the shedathe and the winter. If the Israelis didn't kill us with bombs or we didn't die from their missiles, we die of the cold and winter. Al-Ghazawi says, and al-Haw-Han-Lah! Hald-Lah!

January 1st, 2026, New Year's Day. Israel imposes a ban on dozens of international aid groups from bringing in their staff or aid into Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF. Israel cites new regulations for its decision. Gaza's health system was decimated in the war.

Clinics like this run by international aid groups are helping keep Gaza alive. UN agencies in 10 countries, including the UK, France, and Canada are urging Israel to reverse a ban on well-recognized international aid groups. MSF alone says it treated around a million people in 2025. That's half the population. When that happened, what impacted that have? It was a catastrophic blow. Taking MSF away meant that you are ripping away specialized surgical care,

burn treatment, and post-operative rehabilitation for tens of thousands of amputees and severely wounded people. Which left all those people without the care they needed. Many children. Yes, Gaza having the highest population of amputees of a children in this specific. The U.S. has announced the start of the second phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Just a couple weeks after Israel banned some of the biggest international aid organizations from working in Gaza, the U.S. announced the beginning of phase two of the ceasefire and the creation of a board of peace that would oversee the future of Gaza.

What? But you didn't even finish the phase one. Ennis told me it felt like they were living in an alternate universe from the one they were reading about in the news. We are just like reading the news, not knowing exactly what happened behind the closed doors. The Board of Peace was advertised as a way to help Gaza reconstruction. Trump would be the chairman.

President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a vision for a new Gaza. It could be a hope, it could be a destination, have a lot of industry. It's unclear if any people from Gaza were consulted in this plan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netania, who has been, invited to be on the board of peace. Nan Perra's reporter, Anas Baba, spoke to Palestinians in Gaza and showed them some of the slides. Gada Doher, a mother of four, told him the images look nice at first glance.

But a closer look shows it's all parks and economic zones. Where have our houses gone? She says. As the days of winter counted down, that feeling of being in a kind of alternate universe intensified when a new war pulled the world's attention away. President Trump announcing Iran's Supreme. leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini died in the coordinated attack, sending shockwaves across the Middle East. That's coming up. Hi, this is Annie from Portland, Oregon, and you're listening to Thruly from

NPR. I really appreciate y'all being honest about the past and clear about the present and calling us to action to build a better future together. It's fantastic. I really appreciate y'all work you do. Thank you so much. Part two. They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore. March 26, Israel and the U.S. jointly launch a new war, this time against Iran. And almost overnight, news about Gaza took a back seat to stories about attacks on Iran. Iranian state media sang upwards of a hundred students killed in a strike on a girl school. Air strikes in the Gulf skyrocketing oil prices.

Diesel's higher than it's ever been in this country. The entire world was suddenly steeped in uncertainty about how long this new conflict would go on and what the impacts of it would be. Meanwhile, negotiations on the crucial next steps of Gaza's ceasefire plan like Hamas disarming and Israel withdrawing are suspended. Now everything's frozen. Gus is a disaster.

People do not have jobs. or money and nothing feels normal. Despite the ceasefire, he says people feel they are still living the war. As the world was fixated on the war in Iran, Israeli troops steadily moved a so-called yellow line, dividing the territory they control in Gaza from the areas where Palestinians live. The result is that Israel goes from occupying 50% of Gaza at the start of the ceasefire to now close to 70%. These shifting lines of control

are not clearly marked on the ground, and Palestinians are being shot by Israeli troops as a result. According to the officials in Gaza, the reported of missing people underneath the ripple of around 10,000 to 15,000 people. Ennis says for many, there is no ceasefire, and still no closure. So we want to just like get,

them the dignity of the burial. Anas says, before the ceasefire... It was impossible to bull any person who was trapped underneath the rubble from an Israeliirstrike. It was truly impossible. The UN estimates there are 68 million tons of rubble in Gaza. That's the equivalent to the weight of around 186 Empire State buildings

in an area the size of Detroit. All of the heavy machinery in Gaza are destroyed by Israeli earth. So you wait until the war is over and others just take out the skeletons that still remain there. After the ceasefire, Israel continues to prohibit international aid organizations from bringing heavy machinery like excavators and bulldozers into Gaza. An Israeli security official who was not authorized to speak publicly told NPR that's allowing more heavy machinery into Gaza poses security sensitivities. And Israel prevents

It's major rehabilitation efforts until Hamas is disarmed. By May 26, Enos was hearing reports that Israel was starting to clear rubble in parts of Gaza they controlled, like Raffa in the south. We're talking about a whole city. Israel destroyed and turned it into a sand. Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it had just two functioning excavators available to recover bodies from the rubble. That remains true to this day. Back in May, Enos documented what these very limited recovery efforts look like. He spent three days with the recovery crew of an excavator. And that excavator, they said, okay, where we're going to go, where we're going to go?

Okay, let's go to Bayt Lahia. Where a single family had lost around 130 family members, 70 of whom were still under the rubble. NPR's investigation of the Israeli strike on the Abu Nasr family home found it was one of the deadliest of the war. Annes followed along closely, documenting their efforts. An Israeli drone buses over a sea of debris. So I went there, and they told me, Anas, ICRC gave us only 80 hours on this mission, and we don't know if you're going to do it or not, because you can see there's a sea of

the preys in front of us. Now, a crew has arrived with a huge orange excavator. On the first day of digging, everyone was on edge. But Ennis needed to report to ask the hard questions. So he took his mic out, approached one of the family members whose home was being excavated, and asked, What do you feel today? Since the massacre, about a year and a half ago, we've been dreaming every day of the moment we could recover the martyrs. Every day we felt as if they were calling us saying,

We're here. There were no guarantees the excavator crew would find everyone, or anyone. Keep in mind, they were staring at a sea of debris. We're talking about flaps and stacks of concrete in top of each other. So they had to try to create a mental map. And all the while, Ennis kept his mic and his camera fixed on them. He told me, okay, Anas, we're going to start with imagining and fantasizing with the family. we're exactly where the rest of the family were sitting inside the house and did watch floor.

One hour in. The excavator stopped, and we needed engine oil. It takes us seven hours to find engine oil. And you have 80 hours total to excavate us. Exactly. Exactly. When the machine turns off, the gruesome work begins. 20 rescue workers drop to their knees. They aren't looking with their eyes.

They are using their noses, leaning into the cracks, smelling the air to get closer to the corpses. Aman. The rescue team just managed to recover the first body. Shouki, Abu Nasser. The second skeleton, the third, the fourth, the tenth. The excavator digs deeper into the heart of the collapsed building. The crew finds more victims. managed after that to find one room

that there is around 25 skeletons in the same room and we were shocked. His hair is there, his glasses. Oh, God, brother. This is what they believe happened in the final moment of those 25 people's lives. The family found out that The house is being bombed and it's collapsing.

So all of them ran to this room, to the corner, and suddenly the house collapsed on them. The skeletons were covered in the clothes they were wearing when the building collapsed. The only thing that keeps the skeletons intact is the clothes. They found some wrapped around each other, embracing in a hug. And when they opened one bundle of clothes.

Oh my God. The body is with a baby. She's a mother with a baby. her baby between her arms. And both of them are skeletons. At the end of the three days, he reports the excavator had found 50 skeletons.

When we asked the civil defense, where is the rest of the skeletons? The civil defense answered me that at us most of the time, from the explosion and from the heat, some skeletons evaporates.

At the end of those three days, watching all of this, talking to the family. You saw these skeletons. I mean, what for you was the kind of dominant emotion? The dominant emotion for me was something so selfish, to be honest. I started to thank Allah that I managed with NPR to get my family outside Gaza at the beginning of this war. because if it was me, the one that's still literally waiting for his family under the debris and troubles, I would literally quit journalism and I went to the site of where my family were killed or being trapped, and I'm going to start moving rock by rock every single day, even if that's going to take me 10 years.

Ennis says he's seen people doing just that, sitting beside the rubble where their loved ones lie. day after day, with no hope of getting their remains out. There's only so much a couple excavators can do. In theory, someone could try to rent one of the handful of other excavators in Gaza. But Ennis came across one man who had looked into it, who told him, He's going to cost me $100,000. And they said, well, for two days of work, $100,000? And he said, yes.

If you're thinking, who in Gaza can afford those prices? Anna says not many. But we do have the warlords who works with Israel. Israel has admitted to funding and arming Palestinian militias in Gaza. Some of them, critics allege, involved in stealing aid in order to undermine Hamas. They are the traders, the people smuggling drugs, smuggling cigarettes. One single cigarette, by the way, is around 45 shekels, about 15 U.S. dollars. Three years ago, I was a heavy smoker.

and during this war, I found myself no. I'm not going to kill myself and get my money. So I stopped. And it's not just excavators or cigarettes that are wildly expensive. It's almost everything. Engine oil needed for hospital generators. Batteries. Medical equipment.

Solar panels. Anesthetics. Chicken fruits, vegetables. Even water. Potal of water that was before the war costing me 30 cents. Now it's costing me $2.5. dollars. Enos says you have to understand the landscape of governance in Gaza to understand why things are the way they are. Israel has targeted police in Gaza, deeming them an arm of Hamas,

which once tightly controlled governance there. We could say that Hamas as a government is still there, but we don't have any governmental facilities. Ennis says he has watched this results in a kind of jungle law. And alongside arming the militia, that are undermining Hamas and targeting Gaza's police, Israel continues to regulate everything that comes into Gaza. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, quote, Israel restricts quantities of some goods and bans others outright. It defines many as dual use, including concrete, vehicle parts, and x-ray machines,

asserting they could be repurposed by Hamas militants for military functions. The result? thousands of common items banned. This week, the biggest provider of hot meals in the territory cut its distribution by half. The organization says that is because of higher costs caused by the war in Iran. In this void, a black market has boomed. There is a whole black market and a whole smuggling system

goes between the Israelis and the traders in Gaza. And they make tons of money out of it. That AP investigation found, quote, smuggling rings, which have long flourished, circumventing two decades of Israeli blockades and building a network of businessmen and collaborators, pull in millions of dollars. Payoffs go to Israeli troops, drivers, warehouse workers, and others on both sides of the border. And if you don't have money, what are you eating? If you didn't have money, the IBC just announce. An independent group of global experts who monitor hunger crisis. That's until the moment people in Gaza, and we're talking now in 2026, are still struggling to find one meal a day.

And they are so close to what we called a crisis of famine and hunger. When we come back, summer, winter. When we come back, summer, and ceasefire. My name is Ginny, and I'm calling from Avonmore, PA. I'm listening to Thurline on NPR while I unpack boxes in my new home. Thanks, Therline. I absolutely love your show. Part three.

Summer. Shakira, we are ready. We are ready. We are ready. We are ready. We are ready. It's June. Soccer is on everyone's mind everywhere.

The World Cup is about to kick off. But in Gaza, there wasn't enough battery power to hear Shakira's pulsating new anthem, much less the actual World Cup. Watching the World Cup was one of the hardest thing ever, because we have multiple problems. The first problem was electricity. We reported on people that they are trying to save some battery. But even if they managed to store enough electricity,

connecting to the internet was often a challenge. So most of Gaza were only watching the goals the second day of the game. Like people across the Middle East, Palestinians in Gaza were rooting for Egypt. Egypt's coach, Hossam, Hasam, has been making headlines. After securing a spot in the round of 16, Hassam unfurled the Palestinian flag. My message through football, the world's soft power, I beg you, whatever your religion, whatever country, my message is let the Palestinian people live. By early July, people in Gaza had figured out creative, makeshift ways to watch.

And as Egypt prepared to take on Argentina in the round of 16, they were really excited. Thousands of people gathered between tents and shattered buildings to hold public screenings in front of a project rescuines. Other people climbed the remain of a 14-story apartment building destroyed in an Israeliirstrikes. turning broken concrete into stadium seats. Those projector screens had been set up in large part thanks to an aid worker named Muhammad al-Wahidi. A retired school principal,

he'd spent three decades in classrooms before joining the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza, an organization established by Egypt's president to coordinate aid operations, from food distribution to rubble clearing. But even amid that night's excitement for that match, tragedy, was close at hand. NPR Zanas, Papa, report.

And suddenly while I was reporting on the game, a call just like came to my phone high, there's an earstrike, and one of the Egyptian committee is killed. That aid worker, Muhammad Al-Wahidi. The man, literally, he exhausted himself with helping people. His son, Fawaz al-Wahidi, says the family would plead with him to slow down. Two young brothers, aged 8 and 10, were also killed in the attack. Israel's military said it targeted a Hamas militant, without naming the individual.

We tried to feel that we are part of this world. We share what the people share. We share what the globe is sharing. But we couldn't, unfortunately. Al-Wahid's coffin was draped in Palestinian and Egyptian flags. The same flags that only hours earlier had filled. Gaza streets during a fleeting moment of collective joy. Ennis says it's moments of disrupted joy, like the World Cup, that are sometimes the hardest

to process and make sense of. It's just like, he says, the kites. For people in Gaza, we love to make kites, to build kites in the summer, because we go to the beach. A remaining joy for a child in Gaza. For 11-year-old is Omar. down to the beach to fly his handmade kite. Used to be a simple escape from the war in Gaza. But then, August 23, 26. Israel says it will treat kites crossing the border as an act of war, whether they are armed or not.

When Ennis heard this announcement, he was confused. What? What happened? He looked into it and found... Around seven, literally around seven stray kites? blew away and they reached the buffer zone or southern Israel and suddenly a high-level alert. Israel has pointed to the history of Hamas launching incendiary balloons and kites used to burn farmland across the border back in 2018. Children started to ask questions that we could have answered. They banned everything, he says. Even this kite, we fly when we are bored. Is this a weapon?

They are scared of. I made an interview with a man. Fifty-five-year-old Imad al-Amour immediately gathered his grandchildren's kites. Collected all of the kites of their grandchildren and they burned it. Because the situation became terrifying, he says, it's bitter to deprive our kids of a game they love, then expose them to danger. The Israelis said, any place that there is a kite being launched, look to the term, launched. Okay? The whole tent encampment is going to be asked to evacuate and displace.

With 70% of Gaza already under Israeli military control, the threat of mass displacement hit families like shockwaves. What is it like trying to talk to the children that you encounter in Gaza, who their whole life, as far as they can remember, maybe, is now defined by an unimaginable level of violence and trying to. trauma. To be honest in Gaza, we missed the childhood. We missed that when we talk to a child to feel that he's still having that childish attitude. It's over. Literally, it's over. Most of Gaza's children, when you talk to them, you're going to feel that they are adults. Okay? Wripped clothes, unclean clothes, you can see how black their own feet are because they are walking in the street without any thing or a shoe or even like a flip-flop. So when you talk to them and you say, hi, what do you think about the kites?

And he says, hmm, they told me that I'm not allowed to fly a kite anymore. So I don't care. I'm going to go just to fill the water. I have bigger things to do. When you talk to a child and he says that I have bigger things to do, you start asking yourself what the hell is going on. The World Health Organization has identified a critical shortage of mental health professionals in Gaza. How then do people cope, process everything they have and continue to live through?

It's a question Ennis asks himself and others. When you are in a survival zone, you don't process the trauma. You just store it inside. Everyone is literally feeling expired. that they don't deserve to live and that the world sees that they don't deserve to live. They ask themselves always one question. Always.

What is the guilt that I did? Where the ceasefire goes from here is unclear. In September, Trump's Board of Peace announced a $2.4 billion six-month reconstruction blueprint for Gaza. But it's unclear how that will be implemented given the current gridlock in negotiations. As of late July, Hamas has agreed to implement phase two of the ceasefire agreement to disarm and cede authority to a new governing body established by the Board of Peace

on the condition that Israel fulfill phase one by ending its near daily strikes on Gaza and withdrawing its forces. Israel, however, has said it will not comply until Hamas undergoes, quote, genuine disarmament. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders, including the Defense and Security Minister, have publicly called for rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza on land now occupied by the military and have encouraged emigration, or what Palestinians call, their forced expulsion. And as when I call you again in a year,

what's your biggest hope and what's your biggest fear? Okay. My biggest hope is that maybe, inshallah, the U.S. are going to push Israel to end this war. and there's going to be an Israeli withdrawal. And I do understand that's rebuilt and reconstruction is going to be a far, far, far, far, far, far from a dream.

But at least having that stability of that there is no occupation inside girls anymore. Or starting to digest your emotions, your traumas, finally. What is my biggest fear that's maybe next year when you're going to call me? You're going to tell me, Anna, I'm so sorry that there is no ceasefire and that's the Israeli now occupy more of Gaza and the war is back. Anas, I really appreciate you spending so much time with me and for the work that you do. It's just so incredibly valuable.

Thank you. And it's really, when I start tracking any peace for NPR, I'm always thinking that my voice is going to reach. Americans and the Generation Show were listeners. I would like them to hear exactly the exhaustion, the frustration, the time, the effort we brought to just share with the listeners, the reality, not even Gaza, but all the world. That's it for this week's show. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Ada Blewe. This episode was produced by me and Julia Redpath. Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula.

Molly Marcello. Leanna Simstrom Lou O'Kowski Irene Noguchi This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vocal. It was mixed by Robert Rodriguez, music by Ramtin Ada Blue

and his band, Drop Electric. Archival footage from France 24 appeared in this episode. Special thanks to Ennis Spaba, Ayaba, Ayabatrawi, Didi Skanky, James Heider, Daniel Estrin, Tony Kavan,

Christian Monroe, Johannes Jurgi, and Josie Gettle. If you love the show and want to show your support. Please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Randab del Fattah.

Thanks so much for listening.