Taher Herzallah’s family members in Gaza are moving back to Gaza City after having left during the latest wave of forced displacement in the strip. Herzallah, who’s the director of outreach and grassroots organizing at American Muslims for Palestine, said that he’s relieved that “the bombs are not dropping with such barbaric frequency,” and that his family can return home. “Even if they’re damaged, they’re able to find refuge in their own homes.”
Like Herzallah’s family, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have started to make their journey back to their homes in Gaza City following the news of the ceasefire deal signed by Israel and Hamas.
The deal came after two years of bombardment, triggered by a 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that killed 1,200. Israel’s subsequent assault has killed over 67,000 Palestinians and displaced close to 90% of Gaza’s population of 2 million in what an independent U.N. commission has labeled a genocide.
Herzallah is deeply skeptical of the ceasefire, brokered by the Trump administration, and the governments involved, that is, the U.S. and Israel.
“This deal is being made with an indicted war criminal and a man who’s been impeached twice by the U.S. Congress. Having those two individuals as part of the deal-making process isn’t really a comforting thing for Palestinians who’ve just endured two years of genocide,” he told Sahan Journal.
Nadiyah Salawdeh, co-chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network’s Twin Cities chapter said she, too, is “cautiously optimistic.” “As a Palestinian, it’s genetic to be a little cynical because we’ve been promised things for decades and never really get the good side of a deal,” they said.
Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip follows 76 years of its occupation and illegal settlements across Palestinian territories in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza.
Ali Abu-Atieh found out about the ceasefire late in the night on his Instagram stories, and shared it with his board at the Students of Justice in Palestine’s University of Minnesota chapter of which he is the president. He, too, shares Herzallah and Salawdeh’s apprehension about the credibility of the ceasefire. “The same people that are killing you are the ones that are telling you that we want peace. It’s a very difficult thing to grapple with,” said Abu-Atieh.
Videos of children cheering and celebrating on the streets of Gaza, hundreds of Palestinians waving the Palestinian flag on the streets, and many making their way back home to Gaza City may have offered a moment of relief, but “ultimately, a ceasefire and end to the genocide is an extremely low bar,” said Dr. Christine Harb, a Palestinian-Christian physician and public health practitioner and member of Educators for Justice in Palestine at the University of Minnesota. “A ceasefire only marks the beginning of the Palestinian pursuit of liberation. We will not exchange our homeland for artificial sovereignty in a ghettoized state.”
Herzallah doesn’t see the ceasefire as a peace deal, either. “It’s simply a cessation of current hostilities to allow people to collect themselves for some time until we figure out what’s going to happen next. But at the end of the day, for me, as a Palestinian, and with families still in Gaza, with families who have been killed, and with our homes destroyed, we are the ones who are left to pick up the pieces, and deal with the fact that our family is living in a place that has no infrastructure left.”
One member of the Twin Cities Jewish community also has questions about the ceasefire. “I don’t trust [Benjamin] Netanyahu, I don’t trust [Donald] Trump. Every single deal that has happened, it’s been with their fingers crossed behind their back,” said Michelle Rennie, member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Healthcare Workers for Palestine who is hoping against hope that this will be “the beginning of a true ceasefire.”
“I am so ashamed of what has been done in my name,” said Rennie. “I hope that there will be reckoning within the larger Jewish community about what has transpired at least the last two years, if not all the way back.”
“We just got done with Yom Kippur, and we pray in the plural, for everyone, and we hold each other accountable. And that has got to happen here. If we are going to call ourselves Jews, and really, truly embody that, and embody those values, that has to be looked at,” said Rennie.
As far as organizing for Palestine in the Twin Cities goes, Abu-Atieh says this is the time to step up even more. “We have to organize even more and put an end to the illegal occupation of Gaza and the entirety of Palestine.” He will have his fellow organizers at the U doing the same.
“We’ve seen the repression that we’ve been facing on a local, university, and federal level in the last two years. Regardless, the plan is to continue mobilizing students around divestment and against militarization as long as we’re around,” said Shae Ross, member of the UMN Students for a Democratic Society.
If the ceasefire holds, it marks the beginning of a long road of rebuilding and recovery for Palestinians in Gaza. While Trump has shared many ideas of what that might look like, Salawdeh says that the only way forward is “a Palestinian state with equal rights and full reparations.”
“I want to see the orchestrators, including the propagandists for this genocide, on trial. I want to see Palestinians convict them of genocide. And I want Palestine to be restored by and for Palestinians, with the support of the international community, because the blood is on most of their hands,” they said.
“Somehow the Palestinian people, after taking so many hits and being brutally killed, are raising the flags high, and they’re standing strong, and their kids are cheering and laughing, and it’s the laughter of our children that is the last word,” said Herzallah.
