The ceasefire news came suddenly, with an agreement we had heard before, surrounded by bureaucracy, hope and death. People all around me in Gaza – on buses, on donkey carts, in cars, on the street and in the markets – are describing it as a “war after the war”.

The ceasefire is not the end of suffering. It is the beginning of everything else. It is an opportunity for people in northern Gaza, Rafah and elsewhere to mourn their loved ones who were killed and their destroyed homes. It is an opportunity to cry for those who have held back their tears for more than 15 months. We were told we could return to our homes, but those homes now lie in rubble. Most of them were levelled to the ground; some were left standing but are uninhabitable.

Still, many of their owners want to return. The most important thing now is to speed up the reconstruction phase. Tens of thousands of families have become homeless. Until they have somewhere permanent to live and a measure of stability, these displaced people will still be moving from one place to another, sleeping in tents, using toilets in the ground and in the open, and living in camps that are not fit to withstand the force of the wind or another difficult winter.

Nobody thinks that rebuilding Gaza will be easy, nor that it will happen soon. About 500,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes during the Israeli aggression in 2014, and waited years for the reconstruction process to begin. Funding was delayed and payments deferred. This time, the process will be even more difficult. There are major obstacles before life can begin to return to normal in Gaza. We fear that we are condemned to remain in a prison of rubble, where the smell of blood and death will haunt us wherever we go. And we fear that the Israeli military and government will try to prevent us from returning to normal life – that normality will be replaced by further occupation and suffering.

How many years will it take for the rubble to be cleared? How many years before the country is rebuilt and people can return to their homes, honoured and with dignity? Statistics and projections suggest it could take decades, and history suggests that the work will proceed slowly, hindered by Israeli obstacles that prevent the entry of materials, as well as the construction tools, machinery and fuel needed to operate them. This has been Israel’s practice during every period of fierce aggression against Gaza’s residents. There’s little reason to think this time will be different.

There are many obstacles that we, as Palestinians, face after more than 15 months of war and destruction. The number of families who need help in the Gaza Strip has multiplied, to the point where it is nearly impossible to find a family that is not struggling. Humanitarian aid and goods enter the strip, but the demand for aid is so huge that there never seems to be enough. During these past months of war, as prices rocketed, people have spent everything they had to sustain their lives. Many have been pushed to the brink of poverty.

Despite all of this, there is still one thing that people here cling to: hope. I live in a tent in the town of Al-Zawayda in the Gaza Strip. When I was travelling back home from Deir al-Balah, a town to the south, I noticed children carrying blue bags, their notebooks in hand, heading to the safe spaces that have been established in many of the displacement camps, where they can learn and play.

Hope is what we have right now. We have been crushed countless times, we have lived through difficult circumstances, and many things have died in our hearts. But hope is the invisible thread that binds us together, drives us to keep going, to get up every day, to hold conversations on public transport about what people will do once the war ends. Even though we cannot see the thread, we feel it’s there.

• Al-Meqdad Jamil Meqdad is a writer and researcher from Gaza involved in humanitarian and community work

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