Nour Elassy, whose higher education studies were in English and French literature, was born and raised in the Gaza Strip, in the north-east neighbourhood of Tuffah. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza, following the Hamas attacks of October 7th 2023 that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, since when close to 70,000 Gazans have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, she and her family were displaced and lived for almost 15 months in Deir al-Balah, a town in the centre of Gaza.
She returned to the north in February this year, but in April she and her family were again forced to move.
She says writing is essential for her. She began composing poetry shortly after the October 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel, and has published them online, notably on Instagram.
Elassy left Gaza in July, with the help of the French authorities, after being offered a place to study at the prestigious Paris School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), leaving behind her mother and sister. In this latest contribution to Mediapart, she denounces the reality of conditions in Gaza after last month's tenuous ceasefire was introduced, and how the twisted use of language has become a weapon of the conflict.
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Gaza is not a punctuation mark
They say the guns are quiet, and the truce is holding. They put a ribbon on the wound and call it a ceasefire.
While words can be dressed up, bodies cannot. In the days since the agreement of October 10th, the physics of violence remain: people continue to die, crossings remain closed at will, and promises are bent into loopholes that look like diplomacy. A ceasefire without honesty is not a truce, it is a lie enshrined in silence.
Listen to what the facts say. The Government Media Office in Gaza counted dozens of violations in just the first 48 hours of the truce, dozens of strikes, arrests, and attacks that left dozens more dead. The Rafah crossing, the border everyone said would let through aid and people, has been closed, and opened only intermittently. Israeli officials have tied its opening to the return of bodies and compliance on hostage recovery, then shifted that threshold when it suited them.
Bodies have moved in both directions, the dead of Israel and the dead of Gaza traded like bargaining chips, while whole neighbourhoods remain inaccessible because of rubble and the very “security” the truce claims to guarantee. This is not semantics. It is strategy.
When the coloniser promises a border will open and then insists, one day later, that it will not, when it can promise to hand over dead bodies and then delay, when the language of the truce is drafted in fog and hedged with “if” and “when”, words become weapons. The ambiguity is the point: it buys time, it buys moral cover, it buys the pretence of action without the risk of change. Diplomacy should constrain violence, instead, here it decorates it.
Who will hold the perpetrators to account? The legal avenues that feel eternal, the International Criminal Court, have inched forward despite furious resistance. Appeals by Israel against arrest warrants have been rejected, and the court has refused to be a theatre for delay. Yet a warrant without enforcement is a promise without a body. Justice that arrives by layaway is still injustice. The law can name. The law rarely forces.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
And what of testimony? War is made permanent when testimony is erased. Journalists in Gaza have been murdered, their reporting interrupted, their equipment destroyed. United Nations (UN) experts have warned that the systematic killing and intimidation of reporters is not incidental, it is an attempt to blind the future. If you silence the witness, you bury the record. If you bury the record, the crime graduates to myth. A world without witnesses is a world with no memory and no guilt.
Open any corrections ledger and you will find the same pattern: administrative detention ballooning into mass captivity. More than 11,000 Palestinians are now held in Israeli custody, most of them – if not all – without charges being brought (under administrative detention, which means without any charge). There are many children among them, a number that has risen to record highs since the war began. Prison becomes policy when the detention of a people is normalized into an order. This is not a question of security, it is a system that converts bodies into bargaining chips, political prisoners into collateral.
And while the world stares at the spectacle of Gaza, another front quietly hardens into policy. This is the West Bank, where settler violence has surged and whole communities live under daily raids, with olive groves burned at harvest and displacement rendered routine. The “Gazafication” of the West Bank, the export of siege tactics, the normalization of occupation practices, is underway. If Gaza is the emergency, the West Bank is the project. Both are part of a larger map of dispossession.
Let us be brutally explicit. Humanitarian convoys do not equal justice. Tents are not rights. Food delivered in the shadow of a criminal army that has sealed fields, bombed sanitation, and blocked reconstructive tools is charity, not remedy. Aid stabilizes life long enough to save systems that broke it, and logistics without accountability is an alibi.
This is the moral test of our time, and it reads like a simple question: when we learned of the crime, did we act like citizens or like spectators? The answer matters more than the shape of any map. Saying “never again” is meaningless if it applies only to the victims we choose to grieve. A ceasefire must be the beginning of accountability, not the end of attention. It must be the moment when inspections, prosecutions, and sanctions become not optional but inevitable. It must be the moment when states that armed, funded, or shielded the violence are named. When editorial desks stop laundering euphemisms into acceptance, when international institutions stop morphing law into ceremony.
If we continue to treat Gaza as a momentary headline rather than an indictment of our politics, we will have failed history and ourselves. The children being dug from rubble will have no anniversaries to honour them but the anniversaries of our shame. The test is simple. Will the world use this ceasefire to force a change – legal, political, and moral – or will it fold the bandage and forget the wound? Because words must mean something. Otherwise, they are simply the last safe place for the guilty to hide.
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- A French translation of this chronicle (written in English and lightly edited here) can be found here.