Background
In October 2025, after nearly two years of war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and devastated the Gaza Strip, Israel and Hamas agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire built around President Donald Trump's twenty-point peace plan. The agreement, announced on September 29, 2025, and formally signed on October 9, took effect the following day. It called for an end to active fighting, the release of remaining hostages held by Hamas, a phased Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas, and the eventual installation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority to govern the territory under the oversight of an international body that came to be known as the Board of Peace. An international stabilization force was also envisioned to help secure the territory during the transition.
Nine months later, large parts of that plan remain unrealized. Roughly two million Palestinians are packed into a shrinking strip of territory along Gaza's western coast, while Israel's military occupies the rest under a shifting demarcation line. What began as a ceasefire meant to end the war has, in practice, become a prolonged and fragile standoff in which fighting has never fully stopped, aid has flowed inconsistently, and the political architecture meant to replace Hamas's rule has yet to take hold on the ground.
Key Developments
According to reporting by NPR, which analyzed maps of areas now off-limits to aid groups alongside public statements from Israeli officials, Israel's military now controls close to 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, up from roughly half the territory when the ceasefire began. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been open about the expansion, telling an audience in May that Israeli forces controlled half of Gaza at the start of the truce and had since pushed that figure to 60 percent, describing it as part of a deliberate, step-by-step strategy to encircle Hamas "from all sides" even as the ceasefire nominally holds.
The human toll of that expansion is stark in neighborhoods like al-Shujaiya, once home to more than 100,000 people and, at the start of the ceasefire, still host to roughly 500 families. Today fewer than 50 families remain there, amid what NPR's reporting described as a landscape of rubble and debris. Aid organizations say Israeli authorities now require advance notice before they can enter areas along the expanding military line, and several groups have suspended operations altogether in a section of northern Gaza designated an "orange zone" pending clarification of access rules. With more than 400 aid workers killed in Gaza over the course of the war — UNRWA alone has recorded 390 of its own personnel and affiliated workers killed — humanitarian organizations have grown increasingly cautious about operating near Israeli lines.
Estimates of casualties since the ceasefire took hold vary by source and by date of reporting, an inconsistency worth noting rather than glossing over. Human Rights Watch and other trackers have put the toll at roughly 492 to 733 Palestinians killed and well over a thousand injured in the months since October 2025, figures that have climbed as Israeli forces have continued strikes and ground operations in areas nominally covered by the truce. The United Nations has separately reported severe and ongoing humanitarian strain: as of early February, none of Gaza's 37 hospitals were fully operational and only 19 were even partially functioning, while roughly 77 percent of the population continues to face acute food insecurity. Conditions worsened further at the end of February, when Israeli authorities closed all crossings into Gaza at the outset of the separate Israeli-US military campaign against Iran; weekly aid truck deliveries fell from an average of about 4,200 to as few as 590.
Against that backdrop, Hamas made a significant symbolic move on July 6, announcing that it would dissolve the governing body that has administered Gaza for roughly two decades. Ismail al-Thwabta, head of Hamas's Government Media Office, said the group was ready to hand governance to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic Palestinian committee envisioned under the peace plan to run civilian affairs. That committee, however, has remained based outside Gaza for months, reportedly because of Israeli objections to allowing it to enter the territory. Analysts described Hamas's dissolution announcement as a calculated attempt to shift pressure back onto Israel and the Trump administration to follow through on their own commitments under the deal, since the core of the current impasse lies elsewhere: Hamas has said it will not disarm until Israel completes a full withdrawal and the first phase of the agreement is fulfilled, while Israel insists it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms.
Reactions
The Board of Peace, the international oversight body established under the Trump plan, has repeatedly identified the disarmament standoff as the central obstacle to progress. Its envoy, Mladenov, has said Hamas's obligation to give up its weapons is "not negotiable" and that the deadlock is holding up progress on every other element of the plan, including reconstruction and governance. Human Rights Watch has taken a sharper line toward Israel specifically, accusing it of curbing aid and killing civilians even as the ceasefire nominally remains in force — a characterization Israeli officials reject, framing the military's expanded footprint as a necessary security response to an enemy that has not been disarmed.
At the United Nations, Security Council briefers have described Gazans as trapped in what amounts to a humanitarian emergency despite the formal end of large-scale fighting, and have called for unhindered aid access and stricter adherence to the terms of the peace plan by all parties. The UN's assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs has gone further, warning that the continued impasse over disarmament raises real risk of a return to widespread hostilities — a warning that has drawn less global attention than it otherwise might, given that international focus in recent months has been consumed by the escalating, separate conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran, which began in February and has flared repeatedly since.
For displaced families in places like al-Shujaiya, the reaction has been more immediate: loss of homes, repeated displacement, and a growing sense that the ceasefire, whatever its formal terms, has not meaningfully ended the danger and disruption of the preceding two years of war.
What's Next
The immediate question is whether Israel reciprocates Hamas's dissolution announcement with concrete steps of its own — halting further territorial expansion, easing aid restrictions, or allowing the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza to actually deploy inside the strip. So far there is little public indication that it will do so unilaterally, and Netanyahu's government has consistently tied any withdrawal to prior Hamas disarmament, a sequencing dispute that has stalled the plan for months with no obvious resolution in sight.
The broader international stabilization force outlined in the original twenty-point plan has also yet to materialize in any significant way, leaving a security vacuum that Israeli forces have filled largely on their own terms. With the United States now simultaneously engaged in an intensifying war footing against Iran — including fresh airstrikes and Iranian retaliation against Gulf states in the days immediately preceding this report — Washington's bandwidth and leverage to press Israel on Gaza specifically may be increasingly stretched. Diplomats and aid officials are watching closely for whether the Security Council follows up its recent warnings with concrete measures, and whether the fragile calm in Gaza can hold through the remainder of 2026 or gives way, as the UN has warned it might, to renewed large-scale conflict.
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