Ten months after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, Gaza remains under near-daily bombardment, with Israeli strikes and demolitions continuing even as a late-July disarmament roadmap was supposed to move the truce into a calmer second phase.
Israeli forces killed at least 26 Palestinians over a single weekend at the start of August, according to Al Jazeera, days after President Trump announced what he called a "historic agreement" for Hamas to disarm in stages. In Beit Lahia, Israeli troops demolished homes and the last standing school in a residential compound; in Gaza City, forces fired on a tented classroom, wounding a sixth-grade student, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the ceasefire took effect in October, OCHA has recorded 1,209 deaths and 3,943 injuries in Gaza despite the truce nominally being in force.
Two sides, two conditions
The disarmament roadmap, brokered with US involvement and endorsed by a body called the Gaza Board of Peace, was billed as the long-delayed transition into the ceasefire's second phase. But implementation has stalled over a familiar impasse: Hamas says it will not hand over its weapons unless Israel first halts its strikes and withdraws its forces from the territory, while the Israeli government insists there will be no withdrawal until Hamas disarms.
Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera the group would not move forward until Israel met its own obligations under the deal. Hamas has also said its heavier weapons will not be surrendered absent progress toward an independent Palestinian state — a demand Israel's current government has flatly rejected. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office reiterated that Israeli troops would stay in place until disarmament was complete, and Israeli officials have cited unspecified "serious security concerns" about the broader plan.
Civilians caught in the gap
UN officials have said the continued strikes amount to violations of the ceasefire framework itself. UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said this month that "civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected and should not be targeted," reiterating the applicability of international humanitarian law even amid the ongoing truce. A separate UN emergency official noted that roughly 300 children have been killed in Gaza across the 300 days since the ceasefire nominally began — a toll UN agencies have described as incompatible with a functioning truce. Israeli demolition activity has also extended into the occupied West Bank, where UN monitors say more than 80 Palestinian schools face demolition orders.
With international attention consumed by the ongoing war between Iran and the United States and Israel, diplomats say neither Hamas nor Israel currently faces significant outside pressure to break the deadlock. Absent a breakthrough on sequencing — whether disarmament or withdrawal comes first — both the ceasefire and the disarmament roadmap built on top of it risk unraveling further, even as the fighting has not returned to the scale seen before October.
