LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: In Gaza, the sky is finally quiet now that a ceasefire is in place - no drones, no airstrikes. And now Palestinians say they may finally have space to mourn, to take stock of all that's been lost. But what will life be like on the other side of war? We spoke with two women in Gaza who shared what they're feeling during this fragile time of transition. Shrouq Al Aila is a Palestinian journalist, and when I reached her, she told me right now everything feels unreal.
SHROUQ AL AILA: I am in hangover mode. It was so weird this morning because I got a chance to have, you know, a deep sleep with no airstrikes and explosions. And that feels really weird.
FADEL: Shrouq's husband, Roshdi Sarraj, was killed 16 days into the war when their home was bombed. Shrouq and her infant daughter, Dania, had to survive alone.
AL AILA: Well, actually, what we have endured during this genocide, the displacement, the famine, all of these things were able to shower me with depression. The only reason that kept me resisting is Dania, and she, like, even in the times that I was unable to carry on, she gave me the reason to continue to never stop.
FADEL: Dania was not even a year old when this all started. So what has her life been like?
AL AILA: Dania spent more than half of her age with no drinkable water, with no medical supplies for her illness, with no milk, with no diapers. And because of the famine, she grows up on canned food. She doesn't recognize the apples, the banana and all the other kind of fruit. But what I'm talking about is two years of feeling guilty for not being enough for my daughter, for not being able to secure her with all of her basic needs.
FADEL: In Gaza, she says they haven't been measuring time in days or months. They've measured the passing of time in minutes.
AL AILA: Because every single minute is a sign of surviving. So what I was relying and still actually functioning on is surviving.
FADEL: She says it's difficult to transition from just trying to survive to figuring out how to live again. We also heard that from Shaymaa Ahmed. She's a college student we've been checking in with throughout the war, and yesterday, we got in touch again.
So it's the first time that you're able to really take stock of what's happened and grieve?
SHAYMAA AHMED: I don't think we're allowing ourselves to because it's really hard to face these feelings because there's just so much piled up. But now it's the first time that we're actually trying to face a little bit of it because even the ones that we lost, we still don't realize and we still didn't fully take it in that we lost them. And even the locations that used to hold so many memories that are now out of reach. It's - you know, it's something that we've been just trying to put into this box of so many feelings that we couldn't face with, like, surviving and facing feelings with something that we couldn't do. So it was our survival mechanism to just bury that in. So with it now surfacing, you know, us just trying to deal with it is really, really hard. But hamdala, that's what we keep saying.
FADEL: Shaymaa, how many members of your family did you ultimately lose?
AHMED: Well, my family is a really big one. We lost about 70 from my extended family. I lost my grandmother, two of my uncles, a lot of my cousins. Some of them went missing. Some of them are still under the rubble. And even those we buried, like my two uncles, who were buried in graves, now, when we returned, the graves were basically turned upside down, and we can't even visit their graves anymore because we couldn't find the graves or the place to mourn them at.
FADEL: What is it like to finally have the airstrikes stop after it's been, I think, more than seven months since the last ceasefire? And do you think this one is different, that it will last?
AHMED: Yeah, we hope it does because if it gets broken again, we don't know how to feel then. It is still not, you know, something that we can say, yeah, we finally feel safe. We finally feel like this is not going to happen again. So we can't say we're fully at peace at the moment, and we hope they don't go back on their words this time and break the ceasefire again because we really can't bear it anymore.
FADEL: Shaymaa says her home and neighborhood were destroyed early in the war. She and her family have been displaced 11 times in two years.
AHMED: Just a moment before you called me, actually, I was scrolling through Instagram and seeing the footage from the north of Gaza. We still didn't get the luxury of returning there because Shuja'iyya, the neighborhood where I used to be, is completely out of reach, especially in the first phase. And hopefully, it will become reachable in the second.
FADEL: Out of reach because the Israeli military is still there?
AHMED: Yes, because the occupation is still there, and they're shooting anyone who gets close. And right now, literally, we have no place to go back to in the north. We really wish we can go back, but it's still not an option.
FADEL: When you think about the days ahead, Shaymaa, you know, when we first started talking, you had thought you would go back to college within a few days. And then, ultimately, you started studying online, if you could get online. I mean, what is a future that you see now if you see a future?
AHMED: Yeah. Actually, I'm about to graduate. I managed...
FADEL: Wow.
AHMED: ...To finish university during these two years despite the delay and despite the university being out of reach online because, really, during this genocide, we were surviving, but at the same time, we needed something to give us purpose to make us feel like our life is not just reduced to that mere survival, to really have it have meaning and have purpose. So that was something that really pushed us forward. So hamdala, I'm about to graduate. To us, this land holds so much meaning, and seeing it, like you see in Gaza, is just really gray and full of rubble and dirt everywhere. But still, we see a future.
FADEL: That was Shaymaa Ahmed, a college student, and Shrouq Al Aila, a widowed mother and journalist, both in Gaza.
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