Living in Gaza, we wake up feeling grateful every morning to have survived for one more day. For more than 30 days, we have lived surrounded by death, devastation and desperation. To say that the situation is exceptional does not begin to describe the reality of nonstop Israeli bombardments, huge missile strikes from air, land, and sea, and the collective struggle to stay alive. Nowhere in the Gaza Strip is safe. More than 11,000 people have been killed – over 4,500 of them children. When I hear the phrase “humanitarian pause”, it sounds like a farce. How can it be that when we are in the worst imaginable crisis, some leaders call for a pause and not a ceasefire? The majority of vital resources and infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip have been targeted by Israeli bombardments and destroyed beyond repair. There is no water, no food, no medicine, no connectivity and no fuel. People survive off scraps that are quickly running out, and the stores are empty. Money is meaningless when there is nothing left to buy. Tens of thousands of people shelter wherever they can because 1.5 million people have been forcibly displaced, including my own family, and have had to leave their homes. The list of what we do not have goes on. This is no life. For those of us who are here, under constant fire, we see those massacred by bombs die fast and the survivors die slowly. With the bare trickle of aid that Israel has allowed through the Rafah crossing from Egypt, there is hardly enough water for 5% of us. A “humanitarian” pause will only prolong our suffering. A humanitarian pause is nothing but a small bandage on an open wound and a way to draw this horror out longer. There is nothing humanitarian about starving, being made homeless, living in rubble. When the fighting resumes, we are forced to wonder: what good is a humanitarian pause for aid if the killing doesn’t stop? If you want to give aid and be humanitarian then the killing must stop, through an immediate ceasefire. It won’t help the thousands of civilians, children, men and women who have already been killed, but it will prevent more deaths. Truly, the only humanitarian action for those of us still alive, to be able to survive, is an immediate ceasefire. And then, once the assaults have stopped, we can start going through the rubble of our homes, treating our wounded, burying our dead, and beginning to rebuild our lives. Ibrahim Muhtadi is an architect, designer and business developer