As the war in Gaza grinds past its second year, diplomatic efforts have repeatedly produced ceasefire frameworks that fail to translate into protection for civilians on the ground. The January 2025 truce — brokered with heavy US and Qatari involvement — offered the most concrete hope yet. But within weeks of its implementation, reports of continued killings, detentions, and military operations began to accumulate, raising a fundamental question: what does a ceasefire mean when people keep dying?
The pattern matters beyond the immediate casualties. Gaza’s Government Media Office has documented what it describes as thousands of alleged Israeli violations of the truce. Palestinian Civil Defence officials report ongoing strikes and shootings. If the emerging picture is accurate, the agreement is functioning less as a peace deal than as a managed-intensity conflict with diplomatic cover.
What happened on the ground
Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence, reportedly stated that brothers Abdelmalek and Abdel Sattar al-Attar were killed after an Israeli drone struck Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza on Thursday. Nine-year-old Saleh Badawi was reportedly shot dead by Israeli forces in the Zeitoun neighbourhood east of Gaza City, according to the same source.
Mohsen al-Dabbari, 38, was reportedly killed by Israeli fire south of Khan Younis. Medical sources speaking to Anadolu agency said brothers Mohammed and Eid Abu Warda were shot dead on Mansoura Street in the Shujayea neighbourhood. A witness told Anadolu that three others were wounded after Israeli forces fired towards homes and tents sheltering displaced people east of Maghazi refugee camp.
None of the incidents involved active combat operations in the conventional sense. The victims were in homes, on streets, in tents. These are not isolated anecdotes — they represent a pattern documented across multiple sources and locations, spanning both northern and southern Gaza. Palestinian Civil Defence and medical officials have described a steady drumbeat of such killings since the truce began, with incidents reported in nearly every governorate of the strip.
The scale of post-ceasefire violence
Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports more than 47,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023, a figure that continues to climb. Establishing the precise number of post-ceasefire deaths is difficult because independent monitoring mechanisms were never built into the agreement — a structural failure examined below. But Palestinian health authorities, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and multiple international NGOs have all documented continued fatalities, with OCHA situation reports recording dozens of incidents in the weeks following the truce’s implementation.
UN Women’s humanitarian action head Sofia Calltorp reported that women and girls have died at disproportionately high rates compared to previous Gaza conflicts, according to the agency’s documentation. The agency documented an average of at least 47 women and girls killed each day during the active war phase, a rate that underscores the catastrophic toll on civilian populations and the urgency of making any ceasefire meaningful in practice.
The West Bank dimension
The ceasefire applies to Gaza. It does not formally cover the West Bank, and that distinction has become operationally significant. Israeli forces have reportedly conducted raids across multiple West Bank governorates including ar-Ram and Nablus, with arrests and property destruction by settlers documented alongside the military operations.
United Nations experts have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, citing daily attacks that have resulted in casualties among women and children and widespread destruction of Palestinian homes, farmland, and livelihoods. The language from UN experts has hardened noticeably since the ceasefire began — a shift that reflects a growing consensus among human rights monitors that the West Bank operations represent a separate and accelerating campaign, one that the Gaza-focused diplomatic framework does nothing to constrain.
A ceasefire built on contradictions
The January 2025 agreement was always structurally fragile. The Guardian’s coverage of the deal noted that core questions about governance, demilitarisation and long-term Israeli military presence were deferred rather than resolved. The phased structure — with a first phase focused on hostage exchanges and humanitarian access, and later phases addressing permanent arrangements — meant that the hardest questions were pushed into a future that neither side had incentive to reach on the other’s terms.
The deferred questions are now the conflict. Israel’s continuing strikes are officially justified as responses to ceasefire violations by Hamas or as targeted operations against specific threats. Palestinian authorities record the same incidents as violations by Israel. Both framings can coexist because the agreement never established a credible independent monitoring mechanism — no neutral observers, no binding verification process, no agreed-upon procedure for adjudicating competing claims.
Space Daily has previously examined how the ceasefire’s early weeks produced contradictory outcomes that the diplomatic framework was never designed to absorb.
The Board of Peace and the monitoring vacuum
The institutional response has been to build new structures rather than strengthen old ones. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, reportedly launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, is the most visible example. According to the BBC, the body gives Trump wide decision-making powers as chairman and has been described by US officials as a new international organisation for resolving conflicts.
The United Kingdom declined to sign. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told the BBC that the board represented a legal treaty with implications beyond Gaza alone, and cited concerns about Vladimir Putin’s possible participation. None of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council — China, France, Russia, and the UK — have committed to participation. The leaked charter describes the board’s role as promoting stability, restoring governance, and securing peace in conflict-affected areas. Critics quoted by the BBC say the body appears designed to replace some functions of the United Nations. The charter itself does not mention Palestine.
For Palestinians on the ground, the institutional debate is abstract. A body that reportedly takes years to form its executive committee is not going to stop a drone strike in Beit Lahiya this week.
What the pattern reveals
Ceasefires are usually judged by whether they hold. That is the wrong metric here. The January 2025 agreement has held in the sense that large-scale ground operations have not resumed at their prior intensity. It has failed in the sense that Palestinians continue to die — not in the fog of conventional battle, but in targeted strikes and shootings that the agreement was ostensibly designed to prevent.
The gap between “ceasefire” as a diplomatic category and ceasefire as a lived reality is the story. Governments can point to the agreement’s survival. Palestinian health authorities can point to the continuing death toll. Both are telling the truth about different things.
The journalism covering this gap has itself become dangerous work. Space Daily has tracked the death toll among Gaza-based journalists, which has continued to rise during the ceasefire period.
The hostage question and domestic Israeli pressure
Inside Israel, pressure on the government continues from a different direction. Thousands of demonstrators packed Tel Aviv’s Habima Square recently, calling on the Israeli government to agree a deal to bring all remaining hostages held by Hamas home, according to BBC footage of the protests.
The protest movement and the Palestinian death toll sit in uneasy relationship. Both constituencies want the war to end. Neither has sufficient leverage on a government that has found in the current ceasefire structure a way to claim de-escalation while continuing operations.
The shape of what comes next
The Board of Peace, whatever its ultimate form, is not going to function as an effective monitoring body for the Gaza ceasefire in the near term. The UN Security Council remains paralysed by the political dynamics that have defined its Middle East role for decades. Palestinian authorities will continue to document violations that have no binding enforcement mechanism.
The practical result is that the ceasefire will likely persist as a formal structure while the violations accumulate. The trajectory so far suggests the coming months will look much like the ones already passed — a diplomatic success on paper, a continuing catastrophe on the ground.
Diplomatic vocabulary has a way of outrunning facts on the ground. The word “ceasefire” is doing a lot of work right now.
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