One year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, the territory remains locked in a catastrophic state of limbo, with Palestinians still waiting for the promised “day after” to arrive. While the October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of some 300 children over the past year.
The deal envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory and restore core services and infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries. Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure would begin within 100 days.
The Human Toll of a Stalled Peace
The scale of the destruction remains staggering. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, the 223,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza—roughly equivalent to 15 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—have killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians. Israel’s assault has wiped out some 92 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 95 percent of its farmland, all 12 of its universities, and nearly half of its 36 hospitals.
Although the food situation has improved since last year’s famine, the living conditions are described by UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag as “hell on earth with no prospect of significant change in sight.” More than 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants are internally displaced. Furthermore, the Israeli army has unilaterally expanded its control from just over half of Gaza’s territory to around 65 percent of it.
Political gridlock has choked off the recovery process. A full year after the cease-fire was announced, Israel continues to block the entry of Palestinian governing and policing bodies that would allow Hamas to relinquish power and reconstruction to begin. Hamas and Israel are still at loggerheads about the sequencing of the group’s disarmament in relation to an Israeli withdrawal.
Diverging Strategies and Unyielding Positions
Netanyahu categorically rejected this road map, insisting that there could be no Israeli withdrawal until Hamas was fully disarmed and that Israel remained free to continue military operations in Gaza. Nikolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the high representative of Trump’s Board of Peace, which is overseeing the Gaza peace plan, revealed where the main obstacle to progress lies.
The ongoing military operations and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza don’t incite meaningful outrage in Israel, while even Netanyahu’s main election rivals have felt compelled to trash the U.S.-backed Gaza road map. For Netanyahu, ongoing violence at this level—just enough to prevent Gaza’s meaningful recovery and reconstruction but not enough to trigger a major international outcry—has become an end unto itself.
Unless the United States and its allies and partners are prepared to force Israel to abide by its commitments, it may only be a matter of time before Gaza is lost forever. Palestinians continue to endure a dystopian reality that has become Gaza’s new normal, caught between stalled diplomacy, ongoing military strikes, and an indefinite delay to the reconstruction of their homeland.
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