A coffin, a convoy and a city that refuses to sleep: life at the margins of a fragile truce
When the Red Cross truck rolled up to the perimeter last week, there was a hush that felt more like waiting than relief. Men in army fatigues checked manifests. A small team from the Shin Bet clipped ribbon; a medic adjusted gloves. For families watching from across the barrier, the moment carried the complicated taste of closure and the unbearable salt of confirmation.
“You don’t get to think ‘closure’ in one breath,” said Miriam Adler, whose nephew remains listed as missing. “There is a story inside that casket, and for us the story keeps changing its ending.” Her voice trembled and steadied in the same sentence — a cadence familiar to anyone who has learned to live with grief that can be interrupted by bureaucracy, by politics, by the cadence of a ceasefire.
What happened — and what it reveals
Under the US-mediated ceasefire that began on 10 October, one of the most wrenching clauses was the return of all hostages, dead or alive. In recent days, Israeli authorities announced they had received the remains of a hostage via the Red Cross; Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, confirmed it had recovered a body in Shujaiya while excavating under the so-called “yellow line” that marks Israeli positions inside Gaza.
If confirmed, this would be the 21st deceased hostage handed over since the truce took effect. At the start of the agreement, Israeli tallies indicated Hamas held 48 hostages — 20 alive and 28 presumed dead. The living have since been released; the dead continue to be brought back piecemeal, a painful accounting that refuses neatness.
Voices from both sides
“We are working to complete the entire exchange process as soon as possible,” Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesman, told local media, acknowledging the practical difficulties: many bodies are entombed beneath collapsed buildings, sometimes weeks or months after strikes.
An official from Israel’s Prime Minister’s office was blunt: “Every returned life—or body—is a matter of national and moral urgency.” In a later statement the military said the remains had been transported to a forensic medical centre for identification, the next step in a procedure that blends science, dignity, and ritual.
Shujaiya: where excavations find more than concrete
The neighborhoods of Gaza carry stories the way old books wear fingerprints. In Shujaiya, piles of rubble are layered like sedimentary memory: apartment blocks, makeshift shops, a school with a partially intact mural. “We are digging for everyone,” said Ahmad al-Saleh, a local volunteer. “We find shoes, toys, a piece of a wedding dress — and sometimes, a person.” His hands are calloused from sifting through dust and metal; his voice has the calm of someone who has learned to compartmentalise trauma so that work can continue.
Search operations are slow, dangerous and painfully human. The militants say they need heavy machinery and more personnel to reach bodies under collapsed structures. Their critics accuse them of delaying returns for political leverage. The truth likely lies in both: a battlefield’s devastation complicates every administrative and humanitarian act.
Numbers that won’t let us look away
Statistical tallies are blunt instruments in a messy human story, yet they matter. Israeli officials attribute 1,200 deaths to the 7 October cross-border attack, and 251 people were taken hostage, according to Israeli figures. Palestinian health authorities in Gaza report the Israeli retaliatory campaign has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians; the figures diverge in methodology and meaning, but the arithmetic of loss is undeniable.
Since the truce, the United Nations’ World Food Programme says it has delivered food parcels to roughly one million people in Gaza, and aims to reach 1.6 million. Some 700,000 people now receive fresh bread daily thanks to WFP-supported bakeries. Yet, as Abeer Etefa, the WFP’s Middle East spokeswoman, warned in Geneva, “We are in a race to save lives.” The logistical obstacles — closed crossings, damaged roads, limited distribution points — mean that agency capacity is still only half of what’s needed.
The texture of scarcity
Walk through Khan Younis and you’ll see that aid is changing daily rhythms. Bakeries that once produced loaves in sleepy shifts now crank out round-the-clock bread for hundreds of thousands. “An apple costs what a kilo cost before the war,” said Nour Hammad, WFP’s spokeswoman in Gaza — a small sentence that collapses a lifetime of markets, kitchens, children’s lunches into a single, devastating price point.
Households are coping by reverting to staples: cereals, pulses, bread. Meat, eggs, fresh fruit — luxuries in a landscape where aid trucks are a lifeline and commercial supplies are often priced beyond reach. The limited crossings open — Kerem Shalom and Kissufim — mean that the north of Gaza remains especially vulnerable.
Small moments, large questions
In a makeshift clinic, a nurse named Fatima tied a scrap of cloth around a child’s arm like a tiny flag. “We do what we can,” she said. “We stitch, we feed, we listen. But sometimes the small things are not enough.” Her clinic is crowded, warm with the smell of antiseptic and the soft insistence of children’s breathing. Outside, a queue of people waits for parcels — a line that hints at dignity and dependence at once.
What does it mean when recovery requires not only ceasefires but cooperation from those who fought? What happens when humanitarian agencies plead for access and are met with silence about why northern crossings remain closed? These are not rhetorical questions for those living in Gaza and southern Israel; they are determiners of life and death.
Where to from here?
The exchange of bodies is painful work — forensic, diplomatic, ritual. Each returned person compels a country to mourn, and a community to reckon. Each day that aid does not reach vulnerable populations lengthens the shadow of the emergency.
For readers far from the border, this conflict asks us to hold two things at once: the urgency of immediate humanitarian needs, and the long shadow of geopolitical patterns that make ceasefires and aid corridors repeatedly necessary. What responsibilities do we carry as global citizens when aid deliveries are stalled, when families await the identification of loved ones, when bakeries become lifelines?
We can start by listening — not to headlines alone, but to the small, fierce voices on the ground: the medic, the volunteer, the mother who insists on naming a child even as a city is un-named by destruction. “We are not numbers,” Ahmad said as he sifted through rubble. “We are stories.” These stories are what remain when bullets and politics recede: messy, surviving, insistent. They are what must shape our response.
