Gaza One Year Later: The Ceasefire That Wasnt
A year after Trump's ceasefire deal, Israel controls 70% of Gaza, has killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in that time, and promised reconstruction that never came. What Washington called peace looks nothing like it.
The deal that ended without ending anything
One year ago, President Donald Trump stood at the center of a photograph he wanted to remember: the moment Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza and Hamas released its remaining hostages. The deal, brokered in what Washington framed as a diplomatic triumph, took effect on October 10, 2025. The word “peace” was everywhere in the press cycle.
It has not lasted.
Israeli forces have since expanded their ground control to roughly 70 percent of Gaza, according to NPR correspondent Anas Baba’s reporting from the strip. More than two million Palestinians are now squeezed into a shrinking corridor along the Mediterranean coast. A promised international peacekeeping force never materialized. Reconstruction funds have not followed. And Israel continues to carry out airstrikes and ground operations — including targeted killings of Hamas commanders — inside territory it now occupies with increasing permanence.
More than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in that time. Nearly 500 were women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
What Washington called a ceasefire looks increasingly like a frozen conflict dressed in different language.
Who wins, who loses, who decides
The immediate winners from the deal’s framing were those who could point to a signature and declare the war over. The immediate losers were the people living inside Gaza, where the violence shifted from relentless bombardment to a slower, more uncertain rhythm — intermittent enough to reverse famine, but persistent enough to keep people dead and displaced.
Israel benefits from the status quo in ways that complicate simple narratives. It achieved something it said it could not do during active combat: consolidated military control over most of Gaza’s territory while facing reduced international pressure. The yellow zone markers Baba documents in Bureij — barriers that bar Palestinians from entering large swaths of land — signal a de facto annexation of space, if not of sovereignty. No peacekeeping force means no external check on that expansion. No reconstruction means no Palestinian institutions to rebuild, no economic catalyst to shift the calculus.
Hamas, for its part, has survived as an organization despite continuing Israeli targeting of its leadership. The killing of Izz al-Din al-Haddad, leader of Hamas’s military wing, in an airstrike on May 16, 2026, was a tactical blow. But the group’s presence in the strip — visible in Baba’s image of a boy shaking hands with militants during Eid celebrations — suggests it has not been eradicated, only managed.
The United States gets the political cover of having “ended” a war without committing to what comes next. That is the bargain of a ceasefire without peacekeeping, without reconstruction, and without a political horizon.
The humanitarian arithmetic
The famine in northern Gaza, declared by U.N.-backed experts during the war, has been reversed. More food is entering the strip now that the intense bombing phase has subsided. Fresh produce has returned to Gaza City’s streets. Ramadan prayers were held in public. Children played on trampolines in Beit Lahia. A Christmas tree was decorated for the first time since the war began.
These moments of normalcy are real. They matter. But they coexist with a continuing death toll and a population that remains largely in tents.
Roughly 1.5 million people live in makeshift shelters, according to the U.N., after Israeli strikes destroyed nearly all buildings in the territory. Winter rain makes those tents damp and cold. Aid organizations still need Israeli permission to enter certain areas. Israel banned more than 40 international aid groups from bringing in staff or supplies starting in late December 2025 — a move that compressed an already strained humanitarian system further.
The arithmetic is this: people are no longer starving at the same rate, but they are still being killed. They have food but no homes. They have ceased to be actively besieged in the wartime sense, but they remain confined to a territory under expanding military control with no exit strategy.
What the region saw — and what Washington missed
The ceasefire’s most significant second-order effect may not be in Gaza itself but in how it reshaped regional positioning. Egypt’s role has been quietly elevated. Thousands of displaced Palestinians gathered under Egyptian flags for a public World Cup screening in Gaza City in July 2026 — a gesture that signaled Cairo’s continued relevance as a mediator and neighbor, even as the U.S. took credit for the deal.
The tournament itself, and the ease with which Gazans gathered to watch, suggested a population searching for normalcy wherever it could find it. But it also highlighted Egypt’s geographic and diplomatic position: the country that controls the Rafah crossing, that has hosted peace talks, that Palestinians look to when other doors close.
Washington’s gamble was that a ceasefire would create space for a longer-term settlement. The evidence from the past twelve months suggests it created space instead for entrenchment. Israel has had a year to consolidate control without the diplomatic costs of a full-scale war. Hamas has had a year to reorganize amid the rubble. No third party has had the authority or the will to impose a timeline.
What happens next
The structure of the current arrangement is unstable by design. A ceasefire without enforcement, without reconstruction, and without a political process is not a path to peace — it is a pause with no expiration date and no conditions attached.
If the pattern continues, Israel will maintain its expanded control indefinitely, and Gaza will become a territory under permanent military administration with a civilian population that has nowhere else to go. That scenario raises the likelihood of renewed violence from within Gaza itself, not from an external enemy but from a population that has accepted a year of this as normal.
If there is a different path, it would require exactly what has been absent for twelve months: an international force with a mandate, reconstruction money with strings attached to Palestinian governance, and a political framework that treats Gaza’s future as negotiable rather than predetermined.
None of those conditions are on the horizon. The ceasefire has held in the sense that the war has not fully resumed. But it has not held in any meaningfully productive sense. It is a truce that has become a situation — and situations, unlike agreements, tend to unravel when the world stops looking.