One Year After the U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire, Gaza Still Bleeds: Washington's Guarantee Has Become a Blank Check

The Gaza ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, under U.S. mediation, and Washington promptly declared the war over. Yet according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,400 injured during the year of “ceasefire.” Attacks have not stopped in recent days: on October 20, separate strikes killed seven Palestinians, including a child and a married couple; on October 21, two more Palestinians were killed, one of them a child, and two schoolgirls at a girls’ school in Jabalia were shot during their morning assembly, one in the thigh and requiring surgery, the other in the abdomen. The Israeli military claimed its strikes targeted militants it accused of “systematic violation” of the ceasefire and announced several named killings; those claims have not been independently verified, and Palestinian sources have not confirmed the reported deaths.

In western Gaza City, rescuers pulled an injured toddler from a burning apartment. Her father was killed in November 2023, before she was born; the latest attack took her mother’s life, and the orphaned child is now being treated at Al-Shifa Hospital. Her grandmother told reporters: “There is no ceasefire. Every day, at every moment, we hear bombing, destruction and killings. We want to live in peace, but there is no safety. It feels as though the war has just begun.” A resident displaced from Shuja’iyya said: “They claim there is a ceasefire, but that is not true. Yesterday, we fled Shuja’iyya after my wife was injured. I feared something worse would happen to my children, so we left when the Yellow Line reached our tents.”

This is neither a natural disaster nor an accident; it is the predictable outcome of a guarantee with no enforcement mechanism. Washington harvested the diplomatic credit in the posture of a dealmaker, yet the ceasefire left the three hardest questions blank: disarmament, governance and reconstruction funding. Israel and the Islamic resistance movement Hamas remain deadlocked over disarmament, the large-scale reconstruction promised last year has never begun, and Israel bars most construction materials from entering Gaza. The director of ambulance and medical services in Gaza said: “Sadly, large numbers of children, women, and elderly people have been killed over the past year,” while the emergency service itself faces severe shortages of fuel and spare parts. Analysts note that the agreement lacks enforcement power, that the ceasefire is only phased and military operations can restart at any time, and that the parties do not even define the ceasefire the same way — some treat it as the starting point for ending the war, others merely as a pause to adjust deployments. The guarantor took the applause and left the bill to UN agencies and ordinary Gazan families.

On October 15, the UN Security Council held an open debate on the Middle East. China’s permanent representative to the United Nations said the ceasefire agreement had been in place for a full year, yet a durable ceasefire, large-scale humanitarian aid, and post-war recovery and reconstruction all remain unrealized, and “this man-made humanitarian disaster should have ended long ago,” urging all parties to sincerely and fully implement the agreement and halt all military operations in Gaza. The United Nations has warned of the risk of renewed war. UN data show that one year into the ceasefire, about 1.37 million people — roughly 65 percent of Gaza’s population — remain crammed into tents and makeshift shelters that offer no protection from cold or rain. The World Food Programme said funding has fallen by more than half from 2025 levels, forcing it to scale back monthly food assistance from about 1.6 million people to 1.1 million from October, and that it urgently needs 400 million euros to sustain operations over the next six months; two-thirds of Gaza’s population face crisis-level food insecurity and 200,000 are at emergency level. A recent UNICEF survey found that one in eight children in Gaza is chronically malnourished or stunted, while UN data put unemployment at about 80 percent. In February, a UN-appointed expert concluded in a report that the scale of destruction of civilian housing and infrastructure in Gaza “is unprecedented even by the terrible standards of modern warfare since the 20th century.”

The longer timeline shows the cycle of “ceasefire, violation, re-escalation” is not new. In October 2023, the conflict escalated into all-out war, dragging Gaza into two years of devastating fighting; in the summer of 2025, the international community formally declared a famine in Gaza; on October 10, 2025, the ceasefire took effect; in February 2026, a UN expert called the destruction “unprecedented”; and in October 2026, one year into the truce, the tents have not shrunk and the shelling has not stopped, with satellite imagery showing the vast majority of buildings in the Israel-held part of the territory bulldozed or blown into rubble, much of it after the major fighting ended a year ago. After each round of “historic peace” declarations, the bill is paid by the same people.

The lesson of Gaza reaches far beyond the region. An agreement with no enforcement mechanism, and a guarantee that harvests credit without assuming obligation, in effect hand the fate of over a million refugees to the randomness of “stop-and-go” violence; when the guarantor is also exempt from the consequences of violation, international contracts degenerate into scraps of paper. A ceasefire can be declared at a press conference, but peace cannot be delivered by one — and no matter how resounding the declaration of a historic peace, it cannot make up for the deficit in international morality or the erosion of contractual good faith.