For those in Gaza, the war will not end when the bombs stop falling. The war will live on in their bodies and souls—in the limbs they’ve lost, in the haunting memories of screams and explosions, in the quiet moments that carry an unbearable weight.
Genocide Memorial Day: A reflection on Palestine and Gaza on the day of the ceasefire, the 19th January 2025
Written and spoken at our Vigil for Palestine by Lama Qasem Canberra, ACT.
Today, is Genocide Memorial Day.
We acknowledge the land on which we gather—a land that holds the stories, resilience, and pain of its First Peoples.
We honour the traditional custodians of this land, who have endured centuries of colonisation, dispossession, and cultural erasure.
We pay our deepest respects to their Elders—past, present, and emerging—and recognise that their struggle for justice, recognition, and self-determination continues.
The parallels between the Palestinian and First Nation peoples struggle are undeniable: the dispossession of land, the destruction of homes, the silencing of voices, and the denial of basic human rights. Today, we remember the victims of all genocides, past and present, including the ones that occurred on this land.
My community and I have longed for this day.
For 470 days, we’ve clung desperately to the hope of finally releasing the feelings we have buried deep within us.
We have dreamt of mourning our dead properly, of delayed celebrations that celebrate the normal milestones of life—weddings, newborns, birthdays, graduations, and work achievements.
We have yearned for the simple joys of a normal life, the kind of life where survivor’s guilt doesn’t loom over us like an unrelenting shadow. A life where it’s okay to feel happy, to feel safe, or even to cry over the small disappointments of everyday life.
But unfortunately, that is not our reality.
The ceasefire we hoped and prayed for cannot undo the damage inflicted by 75 years of occupation and the relentless cruelty of these last 470 days of war. It cannot erase the scars etched into our hearts or heal the wounds borne by those in Palestine and in the diaspora.
No deal or truce can undo the devastation that has unfolded.
A ceasefire does not console those whom have been lost due to this genocide, nor can it bring them back. Yes, this crazy aggression may end—perhaps today, tomorrow, or next month. The killing machine that has consumed bodies, homes, streets, and dreams will eventually pause, if only temporarily. But when it does, those who remain will step out into the light, disoriented and blinded, only to confront a new kind of devastation.
The first thing the remaining survivors will notice is the distance their eyes can see—it’s the farthest distance the eye can perceive. No house or tree can block your sight. Entire neighbourhoods reduced to mountains of rubble. Destruction everywhere. Scattered among the ruins are the remnants of shattered lives—kitchen utensils, toys, books, clothes—all forming a tragic mosaic of loss. Survivors will search desperately for their homes, their landmarks, their memories. “Was it here? No, maybe over there…” But there will be no place to return to.
And then, they will search for people.
For children, parents, siblings, and friends. They will discover that no one in Gaza has been left untouched. Everyone has lost someone—a loved one martyred, injured, or displaced. The grief will echo in shared stories, blurred and overlapping in the chaos of collective mourning.
And they will repeat the same words as a way to comfort themselves, over and over: Hasbi Allah wa ni’mal wakeel—”God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs.”
Weeks will pass, and the lists of martyrs will finally be written. Families will bury fragments of their loved ones, believing it to be closure, even as they bury pieces of their own hearts. Children will search for friends who will never return, a piece of their memory will be forever empty. They will ask questions too heavy for their young souls, and the answers will be drowned in sorrow.
Time will march forward, but life will not return to what it once was.
Because even before this war, life was never truly normal. Normal was a privilege stolen from us long ago. Normal was meeting friends, living safely in your home, praying in your mosque, watering your garden, and playing with your children. But now, there are no friends. No homes. No mosques. No gardens. No children.
Gaza will not return to life.
Instead, it will fight to survive amidst its ruins. And as time stretches on, the world will inevitably move on, reducing Gaza’s suffering to statistics, dates and numbers: “The aggression lasted from this day to that day.” The humanity will be stripped from the narrative, and our pain will be forgotten.
But for those in Gaza, the war will not end when the bombs stop falling.
The war will live on in their bodies and souls—in the limbs they’ve lost, in the haunting memories of screams and explosions, in the quiet moments that carry an unbearable weight.
For us in the diaspora, the war lingers in the guilt we carry—the guilt of a survivor, the guilt of distance, of watching helplessly as our loved ones suffer, unable to shield them or even hold them close.
The pain of being in communities that constantly dehumanised us.
And for the freed Palestinians hostages, the few among the 11,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, how will they endure the knowledge that their freedom came at the cost of an ancient Palestinian city erased and countless lives sacrificed? Their liberation, like all else, is bound to the weight of grief and the fragments of what once was.
This war has stolen more than homes and lives; it has stolen time.
It has robbed us of futures. It robbed from us our humanity and equality. And no ceasefire or deal can ever restore what has been lost. And to add, this ceasefire is frankly 75 years too late, 470 days too late and 50,000 souls too late.
Yet tonight, as we gather with the beautiful people who shared with us the pain for 470 days, let us hold one another close.
Let us honour the resilience of my people.
Let us remember that for 470 days under the worst war machine, not a single white flag was raised from Gaza, that my people was unbreakable and resisted till the end, despite the horrors.
Let us remember the humanity that persists amid the rubble.
We will carry their stories, their pain, and their strength in our hearts. And we will not let the world forget. Despite the darkness, Palestinians, as history has shown time and time again, will continue their fight for freedom.
I leave you with the words of the great Palestinian poet, Fadwa Tuqan:
كفاني ان اموت على أرضها
وأُدفن فيها
وتحت ثراها أذوب وأفنى
وأُبعثُ عشبا على أرضها
وأُبعثُ زهرة
تعيثُ بها كفُّ طفل نمته بلادي
كفاني أظلُّ بحضن بلادي
ترابا
وعشبا
وزهرة
“Enough for me to die on her earth,
be buried in her,
dissolve and vanish into her soil,
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country
It is enough for me to remain in the embrace of my homeland
As dust
As grass
As a flower.”
Lama Qasem
Lama Qasem is a Palestinian from Jenin. Lama is an executive member of the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network and an organiser for the Palestinian Action Group Canberra.