For many Palestinians, military occupation and strikes, along with supply shortages, remain facts of life a year after the official end of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

Just over one year has passed since the so-called ceasefire in Gaza began on October 10, 2025. In that time, the deal and US President Donald Trump’s supposed 20-point peace plan have made minimal progress in seriously ending the Israel-Hamas war or Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Instead, a dangerous status quo has settled into place, in which Israel’s occupation of most of the Gaza Strip and its tightened blockade of the territory, alongside a broader assault on the international legal system, represent a direct threat to Palestinian life as Israel aims to ultimately forcibly displace Gaza’s population and annex the territory.

The US government, of course, paints a different picture. Its statement on the 1st anniversary of the would-be ceasefire described “progress” and a “historic breakthrough” that has delivered “remarkable” results. That rhetoric largely matches comments from leading figures in and around the Trump administration and its so-called “Board of Peace,” the body established to govern post-war Gaza’s reconstruction. For officials like Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a lead negotiator on the Gaza file, even minimal progress should be applauded for, among other developments, moderately ending the violence.

Yet it is exactly this mindset that represents the greatest threat to Palestinians in Gaza today. Far from ending the violence, Israel has killed 1,505 Palestinians and injured another 5,332 since the ceasefire was announced, adding to the roughly 250,000 casualties since October 2023. It continues to bomb targets across the strip and has conducted targeted assassinations of Hamas officials in a direct violation of the ceasefire’s terms.

Israel has similarly continued to raze parts of Gaza it directly occupies, wiping major cities like southern Gaza’s Rafah off the map in an act of urbicide that has similarly removed the remains of countless Palestinian civilians it killed during the war. While Israel has allowed more aid into the strip, the increase is marginal at best, improving food metrics from famine to crisis or worse for 1.2 million Palestinians, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism, which partners with the United Nations to measure food security worldwide.

Israel’s ongoing restrictions at the Gaza Strip’s border crossings deserve particular focus as they are crucial to its blockade, undergirding efforts to make life unlivable for Palestinians in whole or in part. Israel regularly blocks basic goods from entering Gaza, including fuel, medical supplies, assistive devices for people with disabilities, and construction materials. It still refuses to permit large numbers of injured and impaired Palestinian patients’ medical evacuations for treatment abroad, even as upwards of 21,000 remain on a waitlist and over 2,000 have died while awaiting evacuation.

The United Nations, leading humanitarian groups, and most major human rights organizations have regularly condemned Israel’s policies in Gaza since the war started in October 2023, which respectable organizations and leading genocide scholars across the globe define as a genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a preliminary ruling in January 2024 in a case brought forward by South Africa, ruling that Palestinians faced a real risk of irreparable harm and that Israel’s acts in the strip could infringe on the rights of Palestinians and their protection against genocide. That ruling ordered Israel to cease its operations and any actions that could plausibly amount to the crime of genocide by ending Palestinian life in whole or in part in Gaza.

That ruling was made just four months after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the start of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Three years into the genocide and one year into the ceasefire in name only, that ruling echoes as a warning that went unheeded, both by former US President Joe Biden’s administration and now the Trump administration. The complicity in Washington, and in no small part across European capitals, in aiding and abetting Israel’s crimes leaves an abhorrent and reprehensible stain on so-called liberal democracy claiming to value human rights and basic human dignity.

Indeed, under both presidencies and numerous European governments, the United States has actively facilitated Israel’s genocide unapologetically. The United States has sold Israel tens of billions of dollars of arms that have killed Palestinian women, children, and the elderly. Its Board of Peace likely aims to help Israel ethnically cleanse Gaza through land appropriation, stealing Palestinian land in the name of “development” and “Israel’s security.”

Washington has similarly provided diplomatic cover in international fora such as the UN Security Council. European states have largely done the same, offering meek statements of “regret” and “concern” while avoiding angering their patron in the United States for fear of losing support in Ukraine. In doing so, each of these governments and their so-called “leaders” choose power and politics over human life.

It is that complicity that places these states in violation of international law. Yet rather than honor international commitments meant to truly say “never again” in the post-World War II system, despite its warts and faults, the United States has doubled down on its assault against the international legal system. The Trump administration’s October 9 sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2024, alongside its pressure on member states to “dismantle” it, exemplify this effort.

These measures represent a broader policy aimed at undermining the rule of law in support of an older era in which “might makes right.” Senior Trump administration officials have said as much, just as Trump himself shamefully did at the annual UN General Assembly summit in late September. In espousing such a harmful ideological approach, Washington and its allies double down on their crimes emanating from Gaza and elsewhere across the globe, from Afghanistan and Iran to Somalia and Yemen.

It is that reality, coupled with Israel’s ongoing actions, that sadly explains why the status quo in Gaza is likely to remain. The world as it is today simply does not value human rights over raw projections of power, reflecting the true death of the so-called “rules-based order” that already benefited the wealthiest and most powerful states. With it dies international law and the idea that all people and all nations are equal and deserve the basic rights that international humanitarian and international human rights law provide. While each state has an interest in supporting the international legal system, short-term power interests ultimately reign supreme.

Yet there is still hope that a better world can grow from the ashes of the last few years. People around the globe increasingly reject the authoritarian and criminal tendencies of a handful of states that have enabled these crimes. Support for Palestine and an acknowledgment and rejection of Israel’s genocide in Gaza continue to grow, and the politics surrounding Israel-Palestine are indeed changing. With it, the hope grows that electoral politics can offer a route for positive change that demands justice for the tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered in the name of an ugly politics that must not only be rejected but remembered.

That shift won’t come soon enough for those lost. However, it can still save a future for Palestinians in Gaza and across the Occupied Palestinian Territory who deserve peace, justice, and self-determination. For now, the status quo in Gaza will remain, requiring the work of human rights and humanitarian organizations to continue advocating for an end to the genocide and real pressure on Israel from Washington to see that end through.

About the Author: Alexander Langlois

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst and the senior editor at DAWN. He is focused on the geopolitics of the Levant and the broader dynamics of West Asia. Langlois holds a Master of Arts degree in International Affairs from American University. He has written for various outlets, including The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Sada, the Atlantic Council’s MENASource, the Lowy Institute, the Gulf International Forum, The New Arab, The Nation, and Inkstick. Follow him on X: @langloisajl.

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