Hope, Interrupted: Gaza’s Moment Of Peace Falters Under Israel Fire

The fragile peace that took hold on October 10, 2025, after a US-brokered plan to pause two years of war is under severe strain, testing whether a negotiated truce can survive the ordinary violences of a long conflict. For a week the streets of Gaza filled with people returning to ruins, aid convoys threaded checkpoints and a first tranche of hostages and prisoners were exchanged under the deal’s opening phase.

But on October 19, the truce splintered: Israel said it carried out precision strikes in southern Gaza after two Israeli soldiers were killed, and temporarily halted the transfer of humanitarian aid amid accusations that fighters had violated the pause.

Those strikes killed scores of Palestinians in a single day, with Gaza hospitals and civil defence describing heavy casualties and frantic arrivals. The Israeli military later said it would resume enforcement of the cease-fire after its retaliatory operations, while diplomats warned that even brief escalations can rapidly unpick fragile arrangements on the ground.

The peace plan envisages phased steps: a halt to large-scale fighting, the release of hostages, international deliveries of aid, and eventually a political process addressing disarmament and Gaza’s governance. Diplomats from Egypt, the United States and Gulf states remain engaged in shuttle diplomacy, urging restraint while attempting to translate a brittle, short-term truce into a durable arrangement.

The conflict reignited on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-linked militants launched a cross-border attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took scores of hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s military response escalated into an extended campaign across Gaza that left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, displaced huge portions of the population and reduced large parts of the territory to rubble.

Previous cease-fires and truces in Gaza have often been short-lived, negotiated under external pressure and unravelled by differing.

In Outlook’s January 21, 2025 issue, George PJ’s 'Promised Land': How The Biblical Idea Of Greater Israel Fuels Conflict’ looked at how religious Zionism assigns an almost divine quality to the Promised Land of Israel. The call of Eretz Israel, the biblical ‘promised land’, is one that both the secularists and the religious Zionists of Israel have heeded, at the cost of the people of that land.

In its January 11, 2024 issue We bear Witness, Outlook magazine attempted to reach out to ordinary people who have been posting about their daily lives on social media from Gaza and refugee camps. We had Zainab’s despatches from Gaza, which shed light on the on the inhuman conditions in which Gazans were surviving each day.

In Gaza is our Home, Yousef Aljamal highlighted the tales of children lost to darkness, the harshness of resource scarcity, and the daily indignities of life under siege.

In Transit, Zak shares the journey from north of Gaza to the southern part at the border of Egypt along with his family. He talked about how as the bombing intensified, he had to trade their home against their survival.

Palestinian Scholar Hussein Barghouthi in his Among the Almond Trees reflects on life and death, art and politics, love and hope. He talks about the notion of the ‘memory of place’ as he stood there among the ruins.

Iftikar Gilani in his Jewish-Muslim Relations, talks about how Jewish history books are replete with accounts of the generosity of Muslim rulers who had granted them religious and social freedoms and saved them from the savageries of the West.