Editor of The Palestine Chronicle, journalist Dr. Ramzy Baroud wrote about the ongoing occupation in Gaza under the guise of a ceasefire for AA Analysis.
Let's make one thing clear from the start: The so-called Trump Gaza plan, announced on September 29, 2025 and leading to the October 10 ceasefire, created widespread hope that international diplomacy would finally stop the violence.
However, the facts on the ground today paint a completely different picture. Despite massive global support for the plan to end the violence, evidence suggests that Israel is using the agreement to overcome military challenges in Gaza while retaining much of its control over the besieged territory.
The plan did not return Gaza to pre-genocide days. While the intermittent Israeli violence in the past has now turned into daily massacres, the siege before the genocide has evolved into a suffocating blockade falling on a people trying to hold on to life among the rubble of their cities and refugee camps.
Genocide under the guise of ceasefire
According to data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed at least 1,471 Palestinians and injured 5,189 since the ceasefire began on October 10, 2025. And these numbers do not even include those who lost their lives due to diseases, lack of medical care and other consequences of the ongoing humanitarian disaster. In any other conflict these figures would be seen as clear evidence that the war was continuing. However, in Gaza, all of this is recorded under the shadow of the reassuring rhetoric of the ceasefire. The even more heartbreaking part is that there were at least 327 dead and 547 injured children among the victims.
According to the joint statement published by more than 100 humanitarian aid and human rights organizations, there is not a single hospital left working at full capacity in Gaza. Morgues are constantly overflowing with new corpses, as well as hundreds of dead bodies pulled from the rubble. According to estimates, around 10 thousand Palestinians are still lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings. How can a ceasefire be called a situation that obliges the Ministry of Health in Gaza to keep separate records for those killed during the genocide and those murdered since the so-called end of the conflict? Can a ceasefire be something that allows bombardments to resume without warning, vehicles carrying civilians being hit, houses collapsing on their occupants, and families continuing to bury their children?
Broken promises and shrinking living spaces
The provisions of the agreement regarding humanitarian aid are also largely left in the air. The plan envisaged an aid flow of approximately 600 trucks per day. However, a UN assessment revealed that during the first 172 days of the agreement, UN-coordinated humanitarian aid shipments remained below 100 trucks per day on average. So where are those vital work machines to remove the rubble, exhume the bodies, and begin rebuilding the places Israel ravaged?
Speaking of debris, there are currently approximately 61 million tons of debris in Gaza, according to data from humanitarian organizations. This amount is approximately 20 times the destruction caused by all wars around the world in the last 18 years. The ruins are also a deadly trap for Palestinians. Last month, 21 people, including 12 children, died as a result of the collapse of a damaged building in Gaza.
While all this is happening, the living spaces of Palestinians are becoming increasingly narrow. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, since the ceasefire began, Israel's military control area has expanded from approximately 53 percent to 63 percent (by some estimates, 70 percent) of Gaza. Despite massive international support for the plan, the agreement's guarantors have been unable to stop Israel's ongoing oppression or ensure the implementation of key provisions. Instead, the issue of disarming the Palestinian resistance became the focus of political discussions, as if the resistance itself was responsible for colonialism, military occupation, siege, apartheid regime and genocide.
Although the ceasefire was advocated by the Trump administration and its allies as a final solution to peace, in practice Israel used it to regroup and achieve goals that it had difficulty achieving in the past. Within the framework of the regulation, while Israel's military activities, territorial expansion steps and restrictions on basic needs continue, Palestinians are expected to stay away from armed actions.
Danger of a new status quo
Unless concrete resistance is put forward against Israel's policies - whether by the Palestinians themselves or through uninterrupted international political and legal pressure - there is a danger that Israel will accelerate its ethnic cleansing moves against the Palestinians in Gaza. This is exactly why Gaza must remain at the center of the international agenda. Social mobilization, political pressure, legal accountability and solidarity efforts cannot be shelved just because an agreement is called a 'ceasefire'.
The international community must challenge the assumption that genocide is over simply because the language used to describe Israel's actions has changed. A ceasefire that has no sanctions, lacks accountability mechanisms and does not end the occupation cannot be an alternative to the freedom of Palestine.
