Big Hopes Gazans Had In The Ceasefire

Friday is the first day of the weekend in which my routine generally includes drinking a cup of coffee with my husband and catching up on the news before my kids are up and the daily chaos begins. So, this ritual of watching T.V. was cancelled. I headed directly to the kitchen to make some coffee half drowsy not remembering yet that we did not have natural gas for a week and that we depended mostly on electrical equipment for light meals and hot drinks preparation. Surely not having natural gas or electricity entailed no ability for heating.

Whether you would like to believe or not and just like in the dark ages, my husband lit manually some coal in the BBQ grill in the balcony and that is how we made our coffee and my daughters' milk!!

I called my mother trying to fish for an invitation to spend the day at their house to find out that the electricity is off and the water had been cut since 5 days because of electricity regular cuts and general water shortage in Gaza. So nothing was left for us but to stay at home with this overcast feeling of deprivation.

At lunch, my husband went to buy a take-away meal for us. Not able to use our car that has been parked since two weeks, he had to walk to the closest restaurant in the hottest weather ever.

Big hopes Gazans had in the ceasefire. A shop owner literally told me "It is too good to be true that benzene and gas will be available in the market". Nothing of what they hoped for had yet materialized. It is just the same.