As 2025 ends, Israel’s relentless violations expose empty promises and perpetuate suffering in Gaza.
A Ceasefire Without Peace: Gaza at the End of 2025
As 2025 comes to a close, Gaza stands not at the edge of recovery, but at the depths of a prolonged catastrophe. What has been repeatedly marketed to the world as a “ceasefire” has, in practice, functioned as a tactical pause—one that allows Israel to recalibrate its violence while maintaining total control over Palestinian life and death. For Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, there has been no meaningful break from siege, displacement, hunger, or fear. There has only been a change in tempo.
The January 19, 2025 ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States and grounded in UN Security Council Resolution 2735, was supposed to mark a turning point. Instead, it exposed once again how international diplomacy, when detached from enforcement and accountability, becomes a cover for continued aggression. Israel delayed implementation until after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, allowing Washington to reframe the truce as a political achievement rather than a humanitarian necessity. From its first day, Israel refused full withdrawal, restricted aid, and continued military operations. The language of peace was preserved; the reality of genocide was not interrupted.
Within a single month, Israel committed at least 265 ceasefire violations—home demolitions, ground incursions, sniper fire, and attacks on civilians. By that point, the United Nations reported that 81 percent of Gaza was either under direct Israeli military control or subjected to arbitrary displacement orders. Entire neighborhoods were rendered unlivable not by accident, but by design.
The January ceasefire collapsed entirely by March. What followed was months of unrestrained bombardment, enabled by political cover from the United States and European powers that continued to arm Israel while muting criticism. When a second ceasefire was announced in October 2025, it arrived hollowed out. Between October 10 and December 29 alone, Israel violated its terms 969 times. While the scale of bombing decreased, the broader machinery of destruction remained fully operational. Gaza entered the end of the year under what can only be described as a ceasefire in name only.
Life Reduced to Survival
The concept of “bare life”—existence stripped of dignity, security, and political meaning—now defines Palestinian reality in Gaza. UN agencies, particularly UNRWA, have documented the scope of devastation even as Israel targets these institutions for daring to bear witness.
Housing has been almost entirely erased. By March 2025, 92 percent of Gaza’s homes were destroyed or severely damaged. Some 2.1 million people—nearly the entire population—are crowded into displacement camps, tents, or improvised shelters amid rubble. The ruins themselves are lethal: unexploded Israeli ordnance is scattered throughout residential areas, with experts estimating that clearance could take two to three decades. Seasonal rains have flooded tent encampments, triggering outbreaks of respiratory infections, diarrhea, and hepatitis. Survival has become a daily negotiation with disease, exposure, and debris.
Hunger and thirst are now structural conditions. The ceasefire agreement stipulated that Israel allow 600 aid trucks per day into Gaza. Between October and December, it permitted an average of just 216. The result is a man-made famine. Around 1.6 million people—77 percent of Gaza’s population—face acute food insecurity, including more than 100,000 children and 37,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women. Nearly four out of five households lack reliable access to food or clean water. No child in Gaza meets minimum dietary diversity standards; two-thirds survive on one or two food groups at most. This is not a logistical failure—it is starvation as policy.
Healthcare, long a pillar of Palestinian resilience, has been systematically dismantled. Hospitals and clinics lie in ruins or function at a fraction of capacity, crippled by shortages of fuel, electricity, staff, and medicine. The UN describes the system as “fragile and overstretched,” a phrase that barely captures the reality of doctors performing triage without anesthesia or power. Yet even here, defiance persists. On Christmas Day, 168 Palestinian doctors graduated amid the devastation of al-Shifa Hospital—a quiet act of resistance against annihilation.
Education, too, has been decimated. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s schools are damaged. Only 38 percent of school-aged children have accessed any form of learning in the past two years. More than 700,000 children have effectively been robbed of their right to education, while 71,000 students were prevented from sitting for their Tawjihi final exams, cutting off paths to higher education. An entire generation is being deliberately pushed into enforced illiteracy and despair.
Erasing Political Life
Even this stripped-down existence is not enough for the occupying power. During the so-called ceasefire, Israel has continued to assassinate Palestinian political and administrative figures, including Issam al-Da’alis of Hamas, Mahmoud Abu Watfa of the Interior Ministry, and Huthayfa al-Kahlout of the al-Qassam Brigades. At the same time, it maintains the imprisonment of prominent leaders such as Marwan Barghouti of Fatah and Ahmad Sa’adat of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Israel’s insistence on Hamas’s unilateral disarmament—while refusing genuine negotiations—reveals the real objective: not peace, but submission. By dismantling Palestinian political life, Israel ensures that even if bombs momentarily fall silent, liberation remains off the table. A population denied leadership, representation, and sovereignty is easier to manage, contain, and erase.
The Lie of Normalization
What the world is witnessing is not a post-war transition, but the normalization of permanent crisis. Reduced airstrikes are presented as restraint, while starvation, displacement, and repression continue uninterrupted. International actors congratulate themselves for de-escalation while funding and legitimizing the very structures that make escalation inevitable.
This is both a ceasefire and not a ceasefire. It is a tactical adjustment that offers minimal relief while preserving the conditions for future mass killing. Without an end to occupation, siege, genocide, and political repression, no ceasefire can bring justice—and no reconstruction can restore what is still being destroyed.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the question at the end of 2025 is not whether peace has arrived. It is whether the world will continue to accept a language of peace that coexists so comfortably with extermination.