October 9, 2025. Day 733

266 days ago, I sat in this exact headspace. It was day 467 of the genocide. The number felt crazy at the time. Today, it is day 733 of the genocide. 2 years and 2 days later, the nightmare ends, supposedly. 

733. That number feels unreal. 

In between those numbers, there are 266 days the world will try to forget.

266 days where Gaza became a graveyard layered on top of itself.

266 days where we saw tents burned, bread lines bombed, and hospitals reduced to ashes.

266 days where children drew pictures of the sea they could no longer reach, while their parents dug with bare hands for bodies.

266 days where the world perfected its silence, where outrage faded into background noise, where genocide became routine.

266 days where every red line was crossed and then erased.

And we counted them all.

On day 467, I was in disbelief that the genocide had to continue for three more days before the ceasefire went into effect. How could we let people counting down to it be killed before it even started? On day 733, I sit in disbelief again. Because even as the world declared an end, Gaza still bled. Even as families dared to smile, the bombs fell again. Not even one hour had passed. They woke up to celebrate, only for more bombs to be dropped when it was supposedly the end.

“Blessed are the Peacemakers,” Trump writes, parading a ceasefire that Gaza barely lived to see. Blessed are the peacemakers, he says, while mothers are still pulling their children from rubble. Blessed are the peacemakers, he insists, while the sky still roars with bombs. If this is what blessing looks like, then a curse would be a mercy.

For 733 days, Gaza has been an open wound. For 733 days, the world’s leaders watched and rationalized. For 733 days, the international system we are told to trust proved itself useless, resolutions vetoed, laws ignored, justice postponed until it was meaningless. For 733 days, silence was a choice, complicity a habit.

Because what does “over” mean when the rubble is still fresh? What does “over” mean when a child learns to say the names of their dead siblings before learning to write their own? What does “over” mean when half a people is gone, and the other half must live with ghosts?

Over is not peace. Over is not freedom. Over does not bring back the fathers who carried their children’s bodies, the children who learned to write their names on their arms so they could be identified later. Over does not return Gaza, or any of Palestine, to freedom. 

733 is not an end. It is a scar, carved into history. A reminder of every failure, every silence, every lie dressed as diplomacy.

And yet, Gaza resists. You resist in ways the world cannot comprehend. You remind us that survival itself is resistance, that to dance and sing and honk your car horns on day 733 is to outlive every so-called “peacemaker” who tried to write you out of existence. That even your hour of joy is more powerful than their two years of destruction.

733 is not the end.

733 is the proof.