Since a ceasefire was declared on 11 October 2025, the Israeli military has killed at least 900 Palestinians in Gaza — including children — bombed residential homes and displacement tents, and issued repeated forced displacement orders giving families minutes to flee with nothing. Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, just announced plans to seize 70% of the territory. The so-called ceasefire, it turns out, was never a ceasefire at all. It was a rebrand.

Two Palestinian girls walking past towering piles of concrete rubble from destroyed multi-story buildings in Gaza during the ceasefire period

The Numbers Tell the Story

The Gaza Health Ministry has documented nearly 900 Palestinians killed and thousands injured since the truce took effect eight months ago. Israeli forces have continued daily drone strikes, airstrikes on residential buildings, and lethal fire on civilians near the so-called "yellow line" — the demarcation boundary Israel was supposed to respect under the agreement.

As we documented just yesterday, two Israeli helicopters struck a tent encampment for displaced families in Khan Younis on 27 May, killing 6-year-old Menna Allah Abu Labda and 31-year-old Hanan Mahmoud. Seventeen were wounded, including a 2-month-old baby with a severed leg. Five more civilians were killed by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City on 23 May.

Our correspondent Salah Akram reported from Khan Younis on 17 May: "The streets are not streets anymore. They are corridors of rubble that swallow whoever walks through them." That report came two days after Israeli warplanes struck the Al-Mu'taz residential building in Gaza City on Nakba Day, killing eight civilians — including three women — and wounding more than 45.

Israel has steadily expanded its zone of control from 53% of Gaza at the time of the ceasefire to over 60% today. Netanyahu confirmed on Thursday at a conference in an illegal West Bank settlement that he has ordered the military to push that to 70%. Defense Minister Israel Katz simultaneously announced that the government's "ultimate aim" is large-scale expulsion of Palestinians — what he called "voluntary migration," but what is, by any honest definition, ethnic cleansing.

The October ceasefire was brokered by the United States under Trump's 20-point peace plan and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803. It explicitly stated that "no one will be forced to leave Gaza." Eight months later, Israel is openly violating every provision while the document gathers dust.

People gathered around a burning residential apartment building hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Nakba Day

Prisoners Tortured, Activists Kidnapped, a Death Penalty for Palestinians

The ceasefire has not brought relief for those Israel holds in its detention system. In March, the Israeli Knesset legalized the death penalty for Palestinians via simple majority vote, granting military courts in the occupied West Bank sweeping power to condemn Palestinians to death by hanging while closing off avenues for appeal or clemency. The legislation was passed alongside an expansion of Israel's torture regime for Palestinian detainees.

Israel's campaign against international solidarity has been equally brutal. On 20 May, Israeli forces seized all 60 vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters — kidnapping 426 humanitarian activists from 44 countries carrying aid to Gaza. Among those abducted was Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila, whose mother died while he remained in Israeli custody, unaware and isolated. He and Spanish activist Saif Abu Keshek were beaten, tortured, and detained based on secret evidence. When survivors of the flotilla finally returned home to Spain, they were met with batons and arrests by Basque police at Bilbao airport — a reminder that Israel's violence against Palestinian solidarity extends beyond its own borders through the complicity of allied states.

The flotilla was forced to take extraordinary measures just to reach Gaza — including, for the first time in history, civilians forcing a 400-meter cargo ship carrying steel for Israeli weapons to change course. When states refuse to act, ordinary people enforce the law themselves.

A man standing amid concrete rubble and twisted metal from a destroyed residential building in Gaza after an Israeli airstrike

The Board of Peace: Complicity by Design

The Trump-appointed Board of Peace, tasked with monitoring ceasefire compliance, released its first report to the UN Security Council last week. Its high representative, Nickolay Mladenov, assigned primary blame for the ceasefire's failures to Hamas — accusing it of refusing to disarm — while offering no meaningful accountability for Israel's documented violations, territorial expansion, aid blockades, or civilian killings.

Aid agencies including Oxfam, Refugees International, and Save the Children immediately challenged the report's framing, accusing Israel of systematically obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries. Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel is obligated to allow 600 aid trucks per day. The actual average: 120. Israel continues to block medicines, medical equipment, and thousands of essential items it claims have "dual use" — the same pretext used throughout two years of systematic deprivation.

As Muhammad Shehada of the European Council on Foreign Relations put it: "Netanyahu is now declaring the whole Trump deal, the framework for Gaza, to be null and void."

The manufactured famine continues. As we reported from northern Gaza, 21-year-old Abdullah al-Zemili has built a makeshift shelter for starving stray cats — a small act of mercy amid conditions so dire that even animals are dying. UNRWA medics are now treating 400 cases of skin infections daily from squalid displacement camps.

A crowd of flotilla activists waving Palestinian and other flags on a ship deck arriving in Istanbul after Israeli detention

The UN: Words Without Consequences

The UN has acknowledged the crisis. At last week's Security Council briefing, representatives noted that over 800 people had been killed and 2,600 injured in Gaza since the ceasefire — figures that have since climbed past 900. A UN report found that the totality of Israeli conduct in Gaza "raises serious concern about the country's compliance with its obligation to prevent acts within the scope of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."

Yet what has followed? Words. Expressions of "concern." Calls for "full implementation." The same hollow vocabulary the international community has deployed for 75 years of occupation. Russia's representative noted that six months after the vote on Resolution 2803, Trump's plan "largely remains dead letter" — with promises to turn Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East" revealed as what they always were: propaganda covering slaughter.

A Palestinian woman in a headscarf holding a shirt while standing outside a makeshift tent amid destroyed buildings in Gaza

Western Media: The Silence is Deafening

Mainstream Western media coverage of the ceasefire has been characterized by the same structural failures that have defined two years of Gaza reporting: passive voice obscuring Israeli responsibility, "both sides" framing creating false equivalence between occupier and occupied, and a consistent centering of Israeli government narratives over Palestinian reality.

When Reuters reported on the 900 deaths, it noted that Gaza health figures "do not distinguish between combatants and civilians" — a qualifier that never appears in coverage of Israeli casualties. When the Board of Peace blamed Hamas for the ceasefire's failures, the framing was amplified without significant challenge. When Netanyahu announced the seizure of 70% of Gaza and his defense minister confirmed plans for mass expulsion, the coverage treated it as a political development rather than what it is: a public declaration of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.

The cumulative effect is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Rows of makeshift tents and shelters for displaced Palestinians stretching across sandy terrain in Khan Younis, Gaza

The West Bank Burns Too

The violence has never been limited to Gaza. As we have documented extensively, organized settler violence has accelerated to an average of more than six attacks per day across 90 communities, with Israeli state backing and police protection. Since January 2026, 1,697 Palestinians have been displaced due to settler violence — already surpassing the total for all of 2025.

Settlers shot a 14-year-old boy in the head while he tried to escape his school in April. They have burned electricity cables, blocked roads, and carried out coordinated pogroms with impunity. Israel demolished Palestinian homes in Silwan on the 50th anniversary of Land Day. Israel's far-right Finance Minister ordered the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar in retaliation for an ICC arrest warrant.

The Israeli military admitted to photoshopping evidence to justify killing a journalist. And as the world fixated on regional escalation with Iran, Israel used the cover to tighten the siege on both Gaza and the West Bank.

What "Ceasefire" Actually Means

The word "ceasefire" implies a cessation of hostilities. What exists in Gaza is something else entirely: a sustained military occupation conducted under the pretense of peace, with international cover provided by institutions designed to prevent exactly this.

Israel has used the ceasefire period to consolidate territorial control, destroy remaining infrastructure, expand the yellow line, legalize the execution of Palestinians, torture detained activists, and prepare the ground for a new offensive — all while the international community debates semantics and appoints commissions that produce reports no one enforces.

Over 2.2 million Palestinians are already crammed into less than half their original territory. UNRWA medics are treating 400 cases of skin infections daily from squalid displacement conditions. Rats and parasites are rampant. Aid is choked. Medicine is blocked. And now Israel wants to squeeze the survivors into 30% of their homeland.

The ceasefire was never about peace. It was about buying time — time for Israel to advance, for the world to look away, and for the genocide to continue under a different name.