Al-Qalam 
By Ismail Suder
As the world holds its breath for a possible Gaza ceasefire within a week or two, a Palestinian student based in Durban says any talk on who will control Gaza must come from the will of its people, not by outsiders.
Abdelrahman Shat, a Business Management student, told Al-Qalam: “Amid growing reports of a possible ceasefire in Gaza, hope flickers – fragile but alive. Yet for my people, especially those enduring months of destruction, hoping for peace is a luxury wrapped in pain. The bombs may fall silent soon – but the scars left behind are deep, strategic, and brutal.
“The Israeli military’s campaign has gone far beyond traditional warfare. What we are witnessing is not merely a battle of weapons—it is the systematic use of power to erase a people’s livelihood, education, and resilience. This is engineered suffering. It is engineering poverty, engineering deprivation, and perhaps most devastating of all, engineering ignorance.
Filtering news reports suggests there might be a ceasefire announcement within a week or two. Talks are being held in Doha, Qatar, to trash out sticking points. U.S President Trump has met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, saying the two were set to discuss “almost exclusively” the situation in Gaza, a sign of the intensifying effort to end the genocide in Gaza.
But Abdelrahman says Gaza has been transformed into a “laboratory of suffering”, where infrastructure is erased, and basic needs are denied as a method of control. “And yet Gaza lives”, he added,
“For two consecutive years, thousands of Gaza’s high school students have not been able to sit for their final general exams—a critical step toward university and a future. Schools lie in ruins. Teachers are gone. Children are traumatised.
“This is no accident. It is a calculated assault on the minds of the next generation. It is engineering ignorance, the deliberate denial of knowledge and opportunity, not by chaos, but by design.
“At the same time, Gaza’s people face engineered poverty. Food and fuel have been cut off. Agricultural land was razed. Aid convoys blocked. Hospitals attacked. Businesses bombed into nonexistence.
This is not collateral damage—it is a system built to keep Palestinians on the brink of survival without dignity. It is poverty by policy”, he added.
Meanwhile, a human rights group has issued a statement saying Palestinians in Gaza have less space than detainees in the notorious US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay.
“After 21 months of continuous Israeli assault, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are confined to less than 15 percent of the enclave,” the Euro-Med Monitor said in a statement.
“Approximately 2.3 million people are crammed into suffocating conditions, each with less space than that allocated to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.”
Gaza’s population is trapped under constant bombardment and a blockade, deprived of water, food, shelter and healthcare, and effectively barred from returning to their destroyed or restricted areas of origin, it added.
“This is part of a deliberate policy that reflects a genocidal process by Israel to uproot the people and erase their physical and demographic presence through mass killing, forced displacement, starvation, and systematic destruction of life.”
