In the capitals it is written down as an achievement: a ceasefire in Gaza, announced by the president of the United States, sealed one year ago to the day. In Gaza itself, the people who haul blankets, bandages and sacks of flour through the checkpoints say it exists where it was signed, and nowhere else. On Friday, more than 100 humanitarian, human rights and civil society organisations — Amnesty International, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, Oxfam, Greenpeace and dozens of others — said so in a joint statement, as Al Jazeera reported.
The ceasefire exists in name only, with Israeli forces continuing to kill and injure Palestinians daily, and restrictions on aid, equipment and rebuilding materials preventing families from recovering.
The truce took effect on October 10, 2025, announced by President Trump as part of the Gaza Board of Peace framework — the American-supervised body that has since told Gaza’s refugee agency to keep out of reconstruction. In the year since, the organisations said, Israeli attacks have killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in the enclave, among them at least 327 children.
The ledger
The arithmetic of the rubble is kept, as ever, by the health ministry in Gaza City. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israel has killed at least 1,471 Palestinians and injured 5,189 more since the ceasefire began. Across three years of war since October 2023, the ministry counts at least 74,254 dead — including at least 21,000 children — about one in every 30 people, roughly 3 percent of the enclave’s pre-war population, and 175,000 wounded, about one in every 13. It is, as a reckoning this week of the lost and the broken made plain, a ledger still being written. The ministry counts only deaths recorded at hospitals or officially registered; the true toll is likely much higher, for the thousands still entombed in destroyed buildings or simply missing are not in it.
A conservative World Health Organization estimate suggests roughly 24 percent of the wounded carry life-changing injuries that need long-term rehabilitation — and a quarter of those injured for life are children.
The hospitals, the tents, the kitchens
None of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is operating at full capacity, the ministry said on Friday, in a territory where the remaining health facilities are overwhelmed and running short of medicine, equipment and fuel. More than 18,500 patients, at least 4,000 of them children, need medical evacuation; more than 1,000 have died while waiting for it. Almost 2 million Palestinians are in desperate need of shelter, in an enclave where 80 percent of structures are damaged, and 1.4 million people face crisis-level hunger or worse through the end of the year.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, called it in the joint statement “utterly shameful that a full year after the ceasefire was signed, so little has improved for Palestinians in Gaza.” The machinery of reconstruction, he said, stays locked outside the fence: “Israeli restrictions are still preventing the required equipment or materials, which are the only ways for communities to begin rebuilding their lives.”
Inger Ashing, chief executive of Save the Children, put the verdict of the nurseries simply: “A ceasefire is meaningless if children are still being killed and families are still unable to rebuild their lives.” Since the ceasefire was announced, the statement noted, nearly one child has been killed every day.
The line that will not stay still
Under last year’s framework, a so-called Yellow Line was drawn to separate the areas Israel controls from those left to the Palestinians. Friday’s statement noted that Israeli forces have arbitrarily moved that line, squeezing the population into an ever more crowded strip of what remains of the enclave. And on the day the statement appeared, the day itself bore witness. Israeli forces shot dead at least one Palestinian after firing live ammunition at civilians in the al-Musaddar, Maghazi and Bureij refugee camp areas of the central Strip, which also came under heavy artillery shelling. In Khan Younis in the south, tanks directed heavy fire toward the Bani Suheila roundabout, and a number of injuries were reported. A day earlier, at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens injured in Israeli air strikes and shelling across Gaza.
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, reached for the largest account of all. “Accountability cannot be buried under the rubble,” she said in the statement. “The persistent failure to hold Israel accountable and press Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice’s binding orders continues to fuel the atrocity crimes on a mass scale against Palestinians.”
There are words, and then there are things. Diplomats keep the first; a people under fire keeps the second. A ceasefire in which a child dies every day is a word in search of its meaning.