Displaced Palestinians stand outside tents as they watch trails of Iranian missiles targeting Israel, from Rafah's Mawasi area in the southern Gaza Strip on June 15, 2025. Photo: AFP.
By Youssef Fares – Jun 20, 2025
Gaza | Iranian missiles streaking across Gaza’s skies do more than interrupt the relentless hum of Israeli warplanes, they carry with them a long-absent hope. After twenty months of war with no end in sight, many in Gaza had succumbed to a brutal fate, unchanged by human will or divine intervention. In the evenings, however, as Iranian waves of missiles cut through the darkness and light up the sky, spontaneous celebrations erupt. Displaced families in tent camps and ruined buildings break into chants and cheers.
When internet networks came back online after a four-day Israeli cut off, the devastation left by Iranian strikes in Tel-Aviv, quickly became the talk of the street. Residents compared the wreckage in northern and southern Gaza to the destruction in Tel Aviv. A hypersonic missile strike in Tel Aviv left a building so damaged, with one social media user drawing comparisons to a landmark tower in Gaza, posting: “Tel Aviv’s version of Al-Shawah Al-Husari.” Another user posted scenes of bodies being pulled from rubble, writing: “This vengeance, this ruin in the heart of the genocidal state, quenches divine wrath.”
In a society reshaped by war, opinions vary sharply about the value of resistance and the price of defying Israeli and US diktats. Many, weary and realistic to the point of despair, believe they are trapped in an unbreakable Israeli era. The first Israeli strike on Iran last Friday, which killed key Revolutionary Guard commanders and nuclear scientists, deepened this pessimism for some. And yet, those same voices now hail Iran’s retaliatory strikes and praise its resilience in absorbing the blow.
“Israeli tyranny, the world’s blanket support for it, and the loss of pillars of Palestinian resistance like Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, all of it broke something inside us,” said Ghassan Muin to Al-Akhbar. “We’re human; our spirits falter under such blows. But after seeing Iran’s powerful response and its defiant will, we felt life return to us. Gaza, the orphan, now feels it has fathers who continue the path and refuse injustice.”
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Perhaps more significant than the missiles hitting Tel Aviv is the collapse of the old narrative, the one long repeated by Arab mainstream media for decades: “Iran’s battles against Israel are merely theatrical”. A chorus of journalists, writers, and Islamists had spent forty years casting doubt on Iran’s intentions. Now, faced with undeniable evidence, they can only retreat to a new refrain: “This war isn’t for the Palestinians.” Such voices, however, aren’t heard by those hungry and displaced, whose patriotism is not a matter of rhetoric, but of instinct.
Abu Rami Hussein, displaced from Jabalia camp to Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, put it plainly: “Let the skeptics deny all they want. Iran, whose leaders, from Qassem Soleimani to Hossein Salami and Ali Shamkhani, became martyrs at Israel’s hand, is closer to Gaza and Palestine than all those hypocrites.” He continued: “This war has exposed everything. The generation living through it sees the truth; they compare those launching missiles at Israel to those shamelessly defending its skies from Jordan. The cover-up is over.”
On the ground, Israel’s preoccupation with, what might seem, its most significant military campaign against Iran, hasn’t slowed the incessant killing machine in the strip. Every day, at least 30 Palestinians are killed while trying to collect aid from US-run distribution points, which have turned into death traps. But there occurred a shift: Israel’s air force has noticeably scaled back, with drone presence vanishing for hours and airstrikes becoming less frequent.
Still, the Israeli military continues to enforce evacuation orders over more than 75% of the Gaza Strip, treating the entire area as a vast combat zone.
