The Trump administration brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in October 2025. Since then Israeli military operations have killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Gaza health ministry announced on Wednesday. The grim milestone illustrates how meaningless the term “ceasefire” has been for people living in the territory, and the failure of President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” to achieve its purported goal of peace and reconstruction.
It’s also a disheartening reminder that although people in Gaza are no longer receiving the level of media coverage we saw during the height of Israel’s bombing and military attacks, the situation on the ground continues to be dire.
Gaza no longer commands the world’s attention as it previously did.
Even though Israel and Hamas are technically participating in a ceasefire, life in Gaza is still defined by brutal warfare, and both parties have accused the other of violating the ceasefire. According to The Associated Press, there are “near-daily strikes” in Gaza, and “shelling and gunfire along the boundary that divides Gaza into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones” continues in the enclave. According to families at Nasser Hospital, an Israeli strike on Wednesday targeted people near the beach in a tent camp for hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans, the AP reported. The Israeli military said its target was a “terrorist.”
Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its casualty count, but it is reasonable to estimate that a significant proportion of the people killed since the ceasefire began have been civilians. The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call published an investigation in 2025, drawing on a classified Israeli military intelligence database, which estimated that a jaw-dropping 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks between October 2023 and May 2025 were civilians. (The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database, but it said “figures presented in the article are incorrect,” without specifying which ones.) UNICEF has reported that Israeli attacks killed more than 100 children in the first few months after the ceasefire.
Trump’s “Board of Peace” was supposed to expand aid and restore civilian infrastructure in Gaza. But an April report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that “living conditions across the Gaza Strip remain dire.” The report said that most families are “still displaced and reliant on humanitarian assistance, including trucked water, particularly for drinking” and that civilians “often cannot afford basic commodities and lack adequate protection from violence and environmental exposure — including to pests and rodents.”
In a May report, the Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch, Adam Coogle, panned Trump’s peace plan as ineffectual.
Zeeshan Aleem
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.