Four Seasons of Ceasefire in Gaza

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 reporter Support 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 http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://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 https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Nature Conservancy. For 75 years, the Nature Conservancy has helped protect remarkable natural places to ensure they thrive for generations to come. Learn more at nature.org/75.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  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?

• 0:32Speaker 02

  If you asked me this question before the war, I would go for Tupac.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I would go for Mozart.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Tupac and Mozart, those are different vibes.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  I know, I know, I know.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Maybe also I'm gonna go for Adele.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I adore this woman.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  But during the war, to be honest, I would rather not to listen to music because they're gonna drain the battery.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So the only Tupac playing is like in your head?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  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 watched a musical film when I was like in my twenties, Le Musulmane. There was a song that still literally plays like shuffle in my head and never stops. Look down, look down, don't look them in the eye. Look down, look down, you're here until you die. Now, prisoners 24610, your time is up and your peril will be gone.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  You know what 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 I feel always that we're all gonna die.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  This is the reality. This is the only belief that I have in meantime, that we're all gonna die.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  This is Enes Baba. You might recognize him. His voice, his interviews, his photos have informed NPR's audience for years.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  NPR's Enes Baba. NPR's Enes Baba. Enes Baba, NPR News, Gaza.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Enes 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.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  During the war, your senses, your emotions are all literally about surviving 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.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  October 10th, 2025.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  The war in Gaza is over.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  A US-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.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  The president last night called this the first step toward a strong, durable, and everlasting peace. Peace in the Middle East.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  The agreement had three phases. Phase one says that the Israelis are gonna take half of Gaza, and the Palestinians are gonna have half of Gaza.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  And the second phase.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Israel would withdraw to around 40% of Gaza. Palestinians would control 60%.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And the third phase means disarmament of Hamas. At the same time.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Israel would withdraw to 15% of Gaza until, quote, Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  And that's the end of the war.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Are being totally crowded and squeezed in only 30% of Gaza. 10% of this 30% are rebels.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Day in, day out, Enes has reported on every development, working closely with a team of colleagues at NPR, including fellow Middle East reporters Ayea Batrawi and Daniel Estrin, to get those stories out to the world.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Until the moment, most of the families in Gaza, they don't talk about their loss because they are still losing more and more.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  So it's not past tense, it's still present.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. It's not past tense, it's still present tense.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  The Israeli military has conducted a series of airstrikes in Gaza.

• 6:07Speaker 06

  There's no life here. Everything is a struggle.

• 6:12Speaker 07

  The Trump administration is planning to deliver powerful 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

• 6:18Speaker 08

  US taxpayer money would fund most of the sale through foreign military financing.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  The numbers tell part of the story, a bird's eye view. But what has the last year felt like on the ground?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I was surprised that this man, every single day, takes a chair and goes to the rubble and debris of his house, and he starts to tell stories to his children, to his mother, to his wife.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we'll travel through the past four seasons of ceasefire with Enes Baba, who carries the dual burden of being both a resident trying to survive and a reporter trying to document reality. Stay with us.

• 7:16Speaker 09

  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 Throughline from NPR.

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  American journalist Austin Teis vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him, and now we finally have some answers.

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  This is the prison that Austin was in.

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• 8:45Speaker 01

  Part one, fall to winter.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Let's start with the first day of the announcement of the ceasefire.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  I was on the street expecting that people are gonna go room the streets, and they're gonna have celebrations everywhere. People are gonna be singing, they're gonna be happy, but they were not.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Leading up to the ceasefire announcement last October, Israeli troops were advancing deeper into Gaza City under government orders to take full control.

• 9:21Speaker 15

  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 northeast and south, blasting their way through, street by street.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Israeli airstrikes were toppling high-rise towers in the city, and nearly everyone was forced to evacuate south.

• 9:41Speaker 15

  NPR's reporter in Gaza City, Enes Baba, documented their arrival to his neighborhood, which itself is now being evacuated.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  In front of me, a father with his two children.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  A children's hospital was severely damaged, according to the World Health Organization and NPR's reporting. Starvation 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.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Nothing looks the same in Gaza after two years of war. Everywhere you look are mounds of rubble and bombed buildings, but there is one thing here that hasn't changed: the sea.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  The sea was the same. On land, nothing was. And getting people to talk, not always easy.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  People are still afraid of journalists. Once I enter a coffee shop, they came to me politely and they say, Anas, 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?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  So it kind of puts you at odds, it sounds like, with the people around you sometimes.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Indeed, indeed.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And some needed to be convinced that the world was still listening.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  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, OK, 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.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  As the days turned into weeks, the still-warm October air made way for a brisk November breeze.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  For the first time in months, there is frozen meat and fish produced like bananas, avocados, and bell peppers for sale on the market. Many children are seeing these foods for the first time.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Anas tried to piece together what had changed with the ceasefire and what dangers remained.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Israeli troops are still positioned deep inside the territory. They are afraid from a bullet. They are afraid from an Israeli tank. Since the ceasefire came into effect, 89 people have been killed by Israeli fire.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  The drones constantly buzzing over the head.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  You're still hearing those drones always?

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, nonstop, every single day, every single night.

• 12:20Speaker 11

  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.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  We are talking about tent cities. People here huddle under flimsy plastic sheets that cannot withstand either rain or wind.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Israel was allowing more aid trucks to enter. Israel said then and says now that aid is flooding 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.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I can feel it. I can feel the water just dripping on top of me.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  The daily struggle, he says, to stay warm and make a fire. And if you were lucky, maybe have a cup of tea.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  What is it that actually take to make a cup of tea in Gaza?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  So making a simple cup of tea in Gaza is a major task. 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 to burn. Because until the moment, the cooking gas is still available. It enters, but it's like, what, five trucks every two days for 2 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.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Is there sugar to put in the tea?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is sugar and there is a little bit of a sweeteners.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  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. Anas 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 US-supported food distribution sites.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  But it's not about the sugar, the sweeteners. It's about the hygiene. It's about how you live.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  It smells like a mix of saltwater from the sea, raw 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 airstrikes on Gaza never stopped.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  At night, they huddle together with all the blankets they have to stay warm.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  January 1, 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.

• 16:21Speaker 15

  Gaza's health system was decimated in the war. Clinics like this, run by international aid groups, are helping keep Gaza alive.

• 16:28Speaker 11

  UN agencies in 10 countries, including the UK, France, and Canada, are urging Israel to reverse a ban on well-recognized international aid.

• 16:36Speaker 15

  MSF alone says it treated around a million people in 2025. That's half the population.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  When that happened, what impact did that have?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  It was a catastrophic blow. Taking MSF away meant that you are ribbing away specialized surgical care, burn treatment, and post-operative rehabilitation for tens of thousands of amputees and severely wounded people.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Which left all those people without the care they needed, many children.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yes, Gaza having the highest population of amputees of children in a specific way.

• 17:15Speaker 16

  The US has announced the start of the second phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. The White House says.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Just a couple of weeks after Israel banned some of the biggest international aid organizations from working in Gaza, the US announced the beginning of Phase 2 of the ceasefire and the creation of a board of peace that would oversee the future of Gaza.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  What?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  But you didn't even finish the Phase 1.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Anas told me it felt like they were living in an alternate universe from the one they were reading about in the news.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  We are just like reading the news, not knowing exactly what happened behind the closed doors.

• 17:54Speaker 17

  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.

• 18:07Speaker 15

  It's unclear if any people from Gaza were consulted in this plan.

• 18:10Speaker 17

  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited to be on the Board of Peace.

• 18:14Speaker 15

  NPR's reporter, Anas Baba, spoke to Palestinians in Gaza and showed them some of the slides. Reda Duhair, 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.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 18

  President Trump announcing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, died in the coordinated attack, sending shockwaves across the Middle East.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  That's coming up.

• 19:05Speaker 19

  Hi, this is Annie from Portland, Oregon, and you're listening to Throughline 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's work you do. Thank you so much.

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• 20:15Speaker 22

  This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talked with David Byrne about the early fashion advice he got from Lou Reed.

• 20:22Speaker 23

  I had really hairy arms at that point. He said, "You should never wear short sleeves."

• 20:30Speaker 23

  Body shamed you.

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  Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Part Two: Spring.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  March 2026. Israel and the US jointly launch a new war, this time against Iran. And almost overnight, news about Gaza took a backseat to stories about attacks on Iran.

• 21:07Speaker 18

  Iranian state media saying upwards of 100 students killed in a strike on a girl's school.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Air strikes in the Gulf, skyrocketing oil prices.

• 21:16Speaker 24

  Diesel's higher than it's ever been in this country.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Meanwhile.

• 21:30Speaker 15

  Negotiations on the crucial next steps of Gaza's ceasefire plan, like Hamas disarming and Israel withdrawing, are suspended.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  No, everything's frozen. Gaza's a disaster. People do not have jobs or money, and nothing feels normal.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Despite the ceasefire, he says, people feel they are still living the war.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  According to the officials in Gaza, they reported of missing people underneath the rubble, around 10,000 to 15,000 people.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Enes says for many, there is no ceasefire, and still, no closure.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  So we want to just, like, give them the dignity of the burial.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Enes says, before the ceasefire.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  It was impossible to bowl any person who was trapped underneath the rubble from an Israeli airstrike. It was truly impossible.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  All of the heavy machinery in Gaza are destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. So you wait until the war is over and then just take out the skeletons that still remain there.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  After the ceasefire, Israel continues to prohibit international aid organizations from bringing heavy machinery like excavators and bulldozers into Gaza.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  An Israeli security official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR that allowing more heavy machinery into Gaza poses security sensitivities. And Israel prevents major rehabilitation efforts until Hamas is disarmed.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  By May 2026, Enes was hearing reports that Israel was starting to clear rubble in parts of Gaza they controlled, like Rafah in the south.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  We're talking about a whole city Israel destroyed and turned into a sand.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  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, Enes documented what these very limited recovery efforts looked like. He spent three days with the recovery crew of an excavator.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And that excavator, they said, "Okay, where we're gonna go, where we're gonna go? Okay, let's go to Beit L'Arhia."

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Where a single family had lost around 130 family members, 70 of whom were still under the rubble.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  NPR's investigation of the Israeli strike on the Abu Nasser family home found it was one of the deadliest of the war.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Enes followed along closely, documenting their efforts.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  An Israeli drone buzzes over a sea of debris. So I went there, and they told me, Enes, ICRC gave us only 80 hours on this mission, and we don't know if we're gonna do it or not, because you can see there is a sea of debris in front of us. Now, a crew has arrived with a huge orange excavator.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  On the first day of digging, everyone was on edge. But Enes 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.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  What do you feel today?

• 25:39Speaker 25

  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."

• 25:52Speaker 01

  There were no guarantees the excavator crew would find everyone, or anyone. Keep in mind, they were staring at a sea of debris.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  We're talking about, like, flaps and stacks of concrete on top of each other.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  So they had to try to create a mental map. And all the while, Enes kept his mic and his camera fixed on them.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  He told me, "Okay, Enes, we're gonna start with imagining and fantasizing with the family. Where exactly where the rest of the family were sitting inside the house and in which floor?"

• 26:24Speaker 01

  One hour in.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  The excavator stopped, and we needed engine oil. It takes us seven hours to find engine oil.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  And you have 80 hours total to excavate.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And then.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  The rescue team just managed to recover the first body. Shawqi Abu Nasser. The second skeleton, the third, the fourth, the 10th. The excavator digs deeper into the heart of the collapsed building. The crew finds more victims.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Managed after that to find one room, that there is around 25 skeletons in the same room. And we were shocked.

• 27:33Speaker 25

  His hair is there, his glasses. Oh, God, brother.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  This is what they believe happened in the final moment of those 25 people's lives.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  The family found out that the house is being bombed and is collapsing. So all of them ran to this room, to the corner, and suddenly the house, boom, collapsed on them.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  The skeletons were covered in the clothes they were wearing when the building collapsed.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  The only thing that keeps the skeletons intact is the clothes.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  They found some wrapped around each other, embracing in a hug. And when they opened one bundle of clothes.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. The body is with a baby. She's a mother with her baby between her arms. And both of them are skeletons.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  At the end of the three days, he reports the excavator had found 50 skeletons.

• 28:28Speaker 02

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

• 28:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  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 rubbles, I would literally quit journalism and I went to the site of where my family were killed or being trapped. And I'm gonna start moving rock by rock every single day, even if that's gonna take me 10 years.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Enes 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 Enes came across one man who had looked into it, who told him-

• 30:02Speaker 02

  It's gonna cost me $100,000. And I said, wow. For two days of work, $100,000? And he said, yes.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  If you're thinking, who in Gaza can afford those prices? Enes says, not many.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  But we do have the warlords who works with Israel.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  They are the traders, the people smuggling drugs, smuggling cigarettes.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  One single cigarette, by the way, is around 45 shekels, about 15 US dollars.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Three years ago, I was a heavy smoker. And during this war, I found myself, no, I'm not gonna kill myself and keep my money. So I stopped.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  And it's not just excavators or cigarettes that are wildly expensive. It's almost everything. Engine oil needed for hospital generators.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Batteries.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Medical equipment.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Solar panels.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Anesthetics.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Chicken, fruits, vegetables.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Even water.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  A bottle of water that was before the war costing me 30 cents. Now it's costing me $2.5.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Enes 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.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  We could say that Hamas, as a government, is still there. But we don't have any governmental facilities.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Enes says he has watched this result in a kind of jungle law. And alongside arming the militias 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.

• 32:17Speaker 26

  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.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  In this void, a black market has boomed.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  There is a whole black market and the whole smuggling system goes between the Israelis and the traders in Gaza. And they make tons of money out of it.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  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."

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And if you don't have money, what are you eating?

• 33:06Speaker 02

  If you don't have money, the IBC just announced-

• 33:10Speaker 01

  An independent group of global experts who monitor hunger crises.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Bitter to be dead than to be in pain, she says. A pain beyond description. We are like the walking dead.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  When we come back, summer in ceasefire.

• 34:08Speaker 27

  Hi, my name is Ginny, and I'm calling from Avonmore, PA. I'm listening to Throughline on NPR while I unpack boxes in my new home. Thanks, Throughline. I absolutely love your show.

• 34:22Speaker 10

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 34:26Speaker 28

  This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Hassan Piker. He's a leading voice of what he calls the insurgent left, although he denies being a leader at all.

• 34:35Speaker 23

  I've never said I'm a kingmaker. The media keep saying this, but I don't think there can be a real kingmaker in socialist politics. This is mass politics.

• 34:43Speaker 28

  Hassan Piker talks with Leila Favel this week on NPR's Newsmakers. You can watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:51Speaker 21

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Support comes from NPR sponsor AARP. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if, instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Part Three. Summer.

• 35:36Speaker 24

  Shakira, we are ready. We are ready.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  We are ready. We are ready? We're ready.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  It's June. Soccer is on everyone's mind everywhere.

• 35:45Speaker 29

  We are ready too.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Watching the World Cup was one of the hardest things ever because we have multiple problems. The first problem was electricity. We reported on people that they are trying to save some battery.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  But even if they managed to store enough electricity, connecting to the internet was often a challenge.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  So most of Gaza were only watching the goals the second day of the game.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Like people across the Middle East, Palestinians in Gaza were rooting for Egypt.

• 36:29Speaker 30

  Egypt's coach, Hosam Hassam, has been making headlines. After securing a spot in the round of 16, Hassan unfurled the Palestinian flag.

• 36:43Speaker 30

  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.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Thousands of people gathered between tents and chatted buildings to hold public screenings in front of a project through screens. Other people climbed the remains of a 14-story apartment building destroyed in an Israeli airstrikes, turning broken concrete into stadium seats.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Those projector screens had been set up in large part thanks to an aid worker named Mohamed 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.

• 37:53Speaker 31

  But even amid that night's excitement for that match, tragedy was close at hand. NPR's Anas Baba reports.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  And suddenly while I was reporting on the game, a call just like came to my phone. Hi, there's a inner strike and one of the Egyptian committee is killed.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  That aid worker, Mohamed Al Wahidi.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  The man, literally, he exhausted himself with helping people. His son, Fawaz Al Wahidi, says the family would plead with him to slow down.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Two young brothers, aged eight and 10, were also killed in the attack. Israel's military said it targeted a Hamas militant, without naming the individual.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  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 Wahidi's coffin was draped in Palestinian and Egyptian flags, the same flags that only hours earlier had filled Gaza's streets during a fleeting moment of collective joy.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Enes 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.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  For people in Gaza, we love to make kites, to build kites in the summer because we go to the beach.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  A remaining joy for a child in Gaza.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  For 11-year-old Isomar, heading down to the beach to fly his handmade kite, used to be a simple escape from the war in Gaza.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  But then, August 23, 2026.

• 39:41Speaker 28

  Israel says it will treat kites crossing the border as an act of war, whether they are armed or not.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  When Enes heard this announcement, he was confused.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  What? What happened?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  He looked into it and found.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Around seven, like literally around seven stray kites blew away. And they reached the buffer zone of southern Israel. And suddenly, a high level of hurt. Israel has pointed to the history of Hamas launching incendiary balloons and kites used to burn farmland across the border back in 2018.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Children started to ask questions that we couldn't answer.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  They banned everything, he says. Even the kite we fly when we are bored. Is this a weapon they are scared of? I made an interview with a man. 55-year-old Imad Al Amor immediately gathered his grandchildren's kites. Collected all of the kites of their grandchildren's and they burned it. Because the situation became terrifying, he says. It's bitter to deprive our kids of the 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 in this place. With 70% of Gaza already under Israeli military control, the threat of mass displacement

• 41:12Speaker 02

  hit families like shockwaves.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  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 trauma?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Okay? Ripped clothes, unclean clothes. You can see how black their own feet are because they are walking in the street without anything, 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?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  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 Enes asks himself and others.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  When you are in a survival zone, you don't process the trauma. You just store it inside. Everyone is literally feeling expired. That's, 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?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  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 2 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 1 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,

• 43:57Speaker 01

  including the Defense and Security Ministers, have publicly called for rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza on land now occupied by the military and have encouraged immigration, or what Palestinians call their forced expulsion.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Enes, when I call you again in a year, what's your biggest hope? And what's your biggest fear?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Okay. My biggest hope is that maybe, Insha Allah, the US are going to push Israel to end this war. And there's going to be an Israeli withdrawal. And I do understand that rebuild and reconstruction is going to be far, far, far, far, far from a dream. But at least having that stability of that there is no occupation inside Gaza 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, Enes, I'm sorry that there is no ceasefire

• 45:07Speaker 02

  and that the Israelis now occupying more of Gaza and the war is back.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Enes, I really appreciate you spending so much time with me and for the work that you do. It's just so incredibly valuable.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Thank you. And truly, when I start tracking any peace for NPR, I'm always thinking that my voice is going to reach Americans and the Israel listeners. I would like them to hear exactly the exhaustion, the frustration, the time, the effort we bought to just share with the listeners the reality, not even Gaza, but all the world.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Julia Redpath. Sarah Wyman.

• 46:20Speaker 25

  Amy Padula. Molly Marcello. Leanna Simstrom.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Lou Olkowski. Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Archival footage from France 24 appeared in this episode. Special thanks to Enes Baba, Aya Batrawi, Didi Skanki, James Hyder, Daniel Estrin, Tony Cabin, Christian Monroe, Johannes Jergi, 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 Rand Abdalvattah. Thanks so much for listening.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Live Right Publishing. Now in paperback, Paul McCartney's New York Times bestseller, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, is the definitive oral history of McCartney's band Wings. Containing interviews with Paul, his family, band members, and close contemporaries, including a new conversation between Paul and Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville, Wings chronicles the triumphant journey of one of the world's greatest musical innovators. Available now from Live Right.

• 47:33Speaker 32

  This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump's diesel deal with Russia? Would it help with shipping costs? And would it even be legal? The United States produces more diesel than it consumes. There's no real need to bring more diesel into this country. Plus, we dig into claims from Ukraine that the US cut access to crucial military satellites. Listen now to Sources and Methods from NPR.