The War on Gaza Has Not Ended

In January, Trump’s Board of Peace was ratified to great fanfare and with the endorsement of the UN Security Council. The White House announced the new organization’s commitment “to building a secure and prosperous future for Gaza.” Jared Kushner, the board’s unofficial special envoy, said it would make infrastructure repair its first urgent task, giving itself one hundred days to restore the basics—water, electricity, the sewage system, hospitals, bakeries—as well as the inflow of food and aid.

Since not a single Palestinian was included on the board, the news was met with skepticism in Gaza. And the board’s first benchmark—its first hundred days—has now arrived. On the ground in Gaza there is no trace of any effort to rebuild, nor have humanitarian conditions improved.

This is what power looks like on the ground. It doesn’t only come in bombs and missiles; it makes itself felt in the slow, deliberate narrowing of life.

I am a journalist writing from Gaza, and I write in fear. Israel has killed 264 Palestinian journalists here; I knew many of them personally. I write in fear and exhaustion, in a profound disorientation of not knowing what is coming next—of having nothing to count on from the future. The people of Gaza had expected the October 2025 ceasefire to bring improvement to their lives. Yet Israel has not withdrawn from the Yellow Line, even though the second phase of the ceasefire agreement required it.

On the contrary, it alone occupies Gaza and now controls more than 60 percent of the Strip. Since the ceasefire, Israel has killed more than 817 of us. Children here still play among the ruins, collecting fragments of their shattered lives along with broken bricks. The genocide continues.

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Every morning here begins with the same uncertain rhythm. People wake up to the low hum of Israeli reconnaissance drones circling overhead, a sound that has become as familiar as birdsong used to be. At sunrise, families—mainly young boys and girls—emerge from tents, carrying a few empty gallon bottles and waiting for a water truck that may or may not come. Israel has destroyed approximately 65 percent of all water wells in Gaza. Along with streets and roads, hundreds of thousands of meters of water and sewage networks have been ruined.

Then the search for food begins. While Israel claims that aid trucks are allowed to enter, the reality in Gaza is completely different. Businesses must pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to bring in a single commercial truck. Israel unofficially encourages this system, allowing traders to import goods while counting many of these commercial shipments as part of the limited “aid trucks” permitted to enter Gaza. The Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an independent organization, periodically tracks the number of actual aid trucks entering Gaza; they remain severely limited. Meanwhile, basic goods are sold at extremely high prices because of the exploitative system imposed on traders, a system Israel does not officially recognize but clearly benefits from. A single egg, for instance, which cost just 10 cents before the war, now costs as much as $1.50—when it is even available.

The result is a grotesque distortion: soft drinks fill the markets, while essential foods like vegetables, eggs, milk, and fresh meat are priced out of reach for most people. People suffer from a new kind of famine: one of affordability rather than total scarcity. Malnutrition is rising rapidly as families struggle to feed their children properly. For the same reasons, we struggle to find even the most ordinary medicines too—painkillers, burn treatments, or essential drugs for common illnesses.

And hundreds of thousands still live in tents, makeshift structures, or damaged buildings that offer little protection from heat, cold, or rain. Repair materials are scarce, so people patch what they can with plastic sheets, fabric, and fragments of debris, trying to create some sense of privacy and safety within the ruins. Raw sewage floods streets and tent camps, creating unbearable sanitary conditions and spreading disease. The highly toxic wastewater also seeps into the groundwater, creating a long-term environmental and health crisis that will linger for years, if not decades. It pours into the Mediterranean Sea, poisoning marine life and devastating the coastal ecosystems there.

Israel controls every aspect of people’s lives—what we eat, how much we eat, the quality of the water we drink, and the environmental conditions we live in. It decides who receives medical treatment and who dies from lack of it, who can travel and who is besieged, whose home is a tent and who lives under roof, where people can live and when they must evacuate.

There are new forms of control too: Israel has imposed unprecedented restrictions on banking and finance, including a near-total ban on cash entering the Strip. This has created a desperate situation: for months, people have been unable to withdraw their own money because Israel destroyed most banks and ATMs during the war. The remaining banknotes are so worn and damaged that they are barely usable. Gaza has never been a society accustomed to electronic payments—almost all daily transactions depended on cash—and it seems Israel is systematically working to empty Gaza of cash to tighten its control over financial transactions and to push toward digital systems it can monitor. Even worse, sending funds from abroad has become nearly impossible. If a family member outside Gaza wants to send support, they often pay up to 50 percent of the total amount in fees and commissions to circumvent Israel’s harsh restrictions on transfers to Palestinian bank accounts inside the Strip.This is what power looks like on the ground. It doesn’t only come in bombs and missiles; it makes itself felt in the slow, deliberate narrowing of life. Our days and minds are occupied by improvising ways to survive in conditions that should not exist in the twenty-first century.But there are other losses in Gaza that can never be measured by the number of aid trucks or by counting the number of our dead. These losses that are harder to count—the loss of people’s own ideas about who they are and what their lives would be like—the loss of ourselves and our futures. While the struggle to survive fills our days, we also think about the losses we carry—our identities, our place in society, the futures we counted on for ourselves.I think about my father, Iyad Alnabih, who turned sixty last April. A distinguished chemistry teacher in Gaza’s secondary schools, and a supervisor of the chemistry curriculum at the Ministry of Education, he reached 60—the retirement age in Gaza—without receiving the pension he earned over twenty-seven years of service. Israel killed two of his grandchildren (Ahmed, age twelve, and Rasha, age eleven), along with his son-in-law, other relatives, and lifelong friends.Once, my father was a man constantly on the move, always in fairly good health, who often rode his bicycle to complete his errands. But the dozens of displacements, the intense bombardment, and the famine he has endured have profoundly affected his health and concentration. A tidy, active man who used to wake up early and walk to work has become worried and absent-minded, overwhelmed by the burdens of daily life and powerless to fully provide for his family.After the ceasefire, he returned to what remained of his house near the Yellow Line in the Shujayea neighborhood, where most homes have been destroyed by Israeli shells. He repaired many ceilings and walls and fixed some of the water and sewage lines himself to make the house somehow livable—or at least better than living in a tent. My father, my mother, my brother Muhammad and his wife, and my sister Nesma now live there despite the extreme danger, Israel’s daily shelling and gunfire, the constant buzzing of drones, and the repeated cutting off of water. According to the map Trump posted to Truth Social last year, the Yellow Line was about 500 meters away from our house. But Israel keeps moving the line; it is now less than 150 meters away.I think about Nesma, who was sixteen years old when the genocidal war began. She managed to sit for the secondary school exams in 2025 and ranked first in Gaza City, despite being internally displaced there. Nesma, or “Nasoom,” as my father loves to call her, dreamed of studying medicine in Germany, just like my brother Ahmed. He had become engaged to a woman named Sahar in Gaza just two weeks before the war broke out, but because he was in back in Germany when it started, he has not seen her since then. The ongoing Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip and the closure of the Rafah crossing makes it impossible both to enter and to leave.Nesma enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza, which was targeted several times. While other medical students around the world focus on their studies, she spends her time searching for an internet connection to take her exams, finding a source of electricity to charge an old phone with a broken screen, or walking long distances to reach her lectures.I think of my mother Ferial, who has suffered under Israeli occupation since the day she was born. Her grandparents were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their land in 1948. In December 2023 she was injured by some rubble from an Israeli shell, leaving her with a painful deformity in the bones of her hand. Throughout the genocide, she cooked for us over an open fire made of wood, cloth, and even plastic because Israel prevented cooking gas from entering Gaza. The toxic smoke caused ongoing eye and respiratory problems and enormous weight loss. She begins every day trying to secure water, food, and bedding for her family.I, too, am deprived of a life with my wife Islam and my children Eyad and Furaat, who now live in Malaysia. After completing my postgraduate studies abroad, I returned with high spirits and a wish to remain and build our lives in Gaza, but I have had no opportunity to join them, even though the Rafah crossing has supposedly been opened, because Israel in practice uses it as a tool of collective punishment against Palestinians. Under Israeli control, it is not a civilian border crossing but a prison gate.

The war on Gaza has not ended. Despite demands from many governments, UN institutions, NGOs, and international courts to change the reality inside the Strip, Israel appears immovable, violating international law and even the ceasefire agreement itself. And while politicians busy themselves with press conferences, Gazans cling to the faint hope that justice may one day be achieved, that Palestinians will obtain their right to self-determination for their state—and their lives—and that the war criminals will be held accountable.

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