The Ceasefire Has Not Brought an End to the Horrors in Gaza, But It Still Can

Better than before, still disastrously inadequate – that’s the reality we’re living in.

This weekend, two Palestinian boys – Fadi and Goma, just eight and eleven years old – were killed for crossing the artificial “yellow line” that now separates the areas of Gaza controlled by Israel and by Hamas. The IDF’s official statement said it had “identified two suspects” who were “conducting suspicious activities on the ground,” and that the air force “eliminated the suspects in order to remove the threat.” These “suspects” were children gathering firewood.

This horrific incident raises a question that a lot of us are struggling with: How can we say there’s a “ceasefire” when horrifying incidents like this keep happening, and more than 300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire went into effect?

This new reality is more complicated than what came before. As the war went on, our goals became crystal clear: Stop the bombing, get the hostages out and get aid in. Now that the war is over, the daily reality for Gazans has improved, but it is still nowhere near acceptable. At the same time, the best route forward – the only one with any real chance – is the 20-point US peace plan that all sides have nominally endorsed. But that plan is being actively undermined every day. Netanyahu wants to avoid any path that leads to Palestinian statehood. Hamas wants to avoid any path that leads to its disarmament. And the Trump Administration, which deserves credit for negotiating the ceasefire in the first place, is moving too slowly, distracted by a new initiative to end the war in Ukraine, and still operating with some of the faulty assumptions that resulted in the total Gaza aid cutoff we saw in the first half of 2025 and the catastrophic Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) experiment.

So yes, it’s complicated. Here’s how I try to grapple with it:

First, we have to be clear: The situation is still horrific – both in Gaza and the West Bank.

The war as we knew it in Gaza is over, and conditions – while still dire – are fundamentally different from the past two years. The mass death toll and nightly airstrikes that killed an estimated 70,000 Palestinians have stopped, aid is entering the Strip at higher levels and all living hostages have been returned. It is inaccurate to describe the reality today by saying “there is no ceasefire.”

But we also have to be realistic about what is happening. Gaza before October 7, 2023 was already in crisis; today’s Gaza is in far worse shape. Over the past two months, more than 300 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes, often because small clashes between Hamas and the IDF trigger an excessive Israeli response that – as has been consistent throughout this war – kills an intolerable number of civilians.

Every crossing of the poorly defined yellow line bisecting Gaza cannot result in Israel shooting first and asking questions later after civilians have been killed. Hamas was supposed to begin disarming and allow others to come in. Instead, it has violently reasserted control over its half of Gaza. Israel was supposed to allow the Rafah crossing to open; it hasn’t. The Netanyahu government has loosened its restrictions on aid, but the amount getting in remains insufficient. At J Street, we have and will continue to call attention to these issues.

And the West Bank is not a separate story. Just this week, we saw a video of IDF soldiers shooting and killing Palestinian suspects who were clearly on their knees, disarmed and surrendering. Ben-Gvir’s first instinct was to promote the commander involved. If this much is captured on one phone video, imagine the images we’re not seeing.

Settler violence is spiking while the number of investigations into those actions plummets. The data speaks for itself.

It’s why J Street keeps pushing the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which now has more than 100 supporters in the House and a growing number in the Senate.

Second, we have to keep calling for full implementation of the American postwar plan while being clear-eyed about the challenges.

The 20-point plan remains the best route available. I worked on versions of similar plans during the Biden Administration, and the basic logic is the same: Stabilize Gaza with an international force, build an interim Palestinian governance structure and create a pathway to a unified Palestinian state. But Netanyahu and Hamas want this plan to fail for different reasons. For Netanyahu, it leads to a Palestinian state he will never accept. For Hamas, it ends with them weakened, disarmed and replaced. So both sides are working – openly and quietly – to freeze the situation in place, with Gaza split in half and no political horizon.

The only actor with the ability to prevent that outcome is the United States, working with Arab states. But the Trump Administration is hardly a model of discipline or consistency. They say the right things some days, then lose interest the next. They’ve already drifted toward Ukraine, with Kushner and Witkoff apparently investing most of their attention there and Trump declaring – absurdly – that his Middle East plan has already achieved “enduring peace.” None of this inspires confidence.

Still, when they do something right, we should say so. The recent UN Security Council resolution is one example. Was it perfect? Not close. Did it contain all the language I would have wanted on Palestinian statehood and past UNSC resolutions? No. But that was never what this resolution was going to be. Its purpose was to authorize an international stabilization force. And for many countries, UN authorization was the only way they’d agree to participate. On that core question, the resolution did what it needed to do. That matters.

But then there are the moments when the administration is clearly heading in the wrong direction – and we need to call that out just as forcefully. The biggest problem right now is the apparent US willingness to go along with Netanyahu’s “red line” forbidding any Palestinian Authority (PA) involvement in Gaza. That’s simply not workable. There is no alternative Palestinian governance structure waiting to be invented. We’ve just seen two years of failed experiments trying to create one from scratch in Gaza.

Rejecting the PA outright is like saying, “I hate the US government under Trump, so let’s just build an entirely new American government from zero.” Governments don’t work that way. Any serious plan requires PA involvement – especially PA security forces, who actually have a real track record of coordination with Israel and the US. If the Trump Administration is indeed planning for a Gaza without the PA, we should be raising every alarm bell we have.

There’s a whole range of issues in the middle where we should be skeptical but still open-minded. Trump’s “Board of Peace,” for example, risks looking like a colonial overseer. When I worked on these types of plans, we always acknowledged a need for an international coordinating mechanism, but I never expected the Palestinian transitional entity running Gaza to report to it instead of working with it. On the other hand, forcing Trump and other world leaders to take long-term responsibility for Gaza’s stabilization could have value. I’m not optimistic, but I’m not dismissing it outright.

Then there’s the idea of building “Alternative Safe Communities” on the Israeli side to draw Palestinians in and create a model for rebuilding Gaza. As long as the IDF is in charge, this is a non-starter. Palestinians trust the IDF even less than they trust Hamas, and they are certainly not going to walk toward a border where they are currently being shot at. The fact that the idea is being concocted by many of the same people who brought us the GHF mechanism over the summer also makes me deeply suspicious. But if an international force takes over these areas and the IDF withdraws, maybe there’s a narrow version of this idea that could help. In post-conflict environments, you have to try a lot of things. Some will fail – spectacularly. (Think of the $500 million US program in Syria that produced maybe 100 fighters who were immediately routed). Others, like the initial partnership with the Kurds in Northeast Syria, started small and blossomed into key pillars of US strategy as they led to success on the ground. So I’m willing to be open to supporting these communities as long as they are one of a number of initiatives, and the US is also focused on concepts that can work on the Hamas-controlled side of Gaza.

Disarming Hamas is another example. Everyone agrees on the end goal; the question is when and how. Israel wants it up front. That’s not realistic. The sequence has to be: Replace Hamas governance and security mechanisms, weaken them, then disarm. The US understands this intellectually, but the question is whether the Trump Administration is willing to push Israel hard enough to operationalize it.

This is the reality we’re in. It’s messy. It’s contradictory. It’s excruciating.

And so what we need is a kind of double vision. Keep shining a light on the daily injustices and calling for better. Support the US peace plan because it’s the only viable path, while calling out Netanyahu and Hamas when they sabotage it. Support the Trump Administration when it moves in the right direction, and challenge it when it heads off a cliff. And in the wide space in between, stay skeptical but open – insisting that we try multiple approaches rather than betting everything on one untested idea.

That’s the only way to navigate this incredibly complicated moment: With moral clarity, strategic realism and a willingness to hold more than one truth at the same time.