Peace In The Middle-East? The First Phase of Israel-Gaza Peace Deal Begins

On October 9, 2025, Gazans took to their broken down streets and celebrated. Many believe the two-year-long conflict with Israel is coming to an end. After intense pressure from global politico, including the United States, Israel and Hamas have agreed to first phase of a US-brokered 20-point peace deal. 

Under this agreement, which was first announced by US President Donald Trump, Hamas will return to Israel all living hostages, and Israel will withdraw its troops to agreed-upon lines. A cease fire would be in place and Israel would allow humanitarian aid back into Gaza.

If this deal holds, it will be the Gazans first peaceful night, not just in two years, but since the beginning of the 20th century when Israel was formed and subsequent wars between the two peoples began. 

While Israel remembers 1948 has the year of its formations, the Palestinians call that era the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic. The events that led to the Nakba are infamous. Starting with the United Nations General Assembly recommendation of partitioning Mandatory Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The Arab world rejected the plan, saying it allocated 56 per cent of the land to a proposed Jewish state despite the Palestinian Arab population being a two-thirds majority in the area.

After the UN Resolution, fighting between Zionist militias and Palestinian Arabs caused about half of the 750,000 refugees to flee before Israel's formal declaration of independence in May 1948. Over the years since, Israel occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza after the 1967 war.

On October 7, 2023 Hamas launched a fatal incursion and assault into southern Israel, killing over 1,200 Israeli deaths and taking hostages. Israel’s response was a military campaign that has killed over 67,000 Palestinians and a near-total decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure and displacement of its people. 

The campaign has somewhat backfired on Israel. Global powers who had been the Jewish state’s allies have pushed for ceasefire and recognised the Palestinian state. The new peace plan, announced by Donald Trump on September 29, 2025, lays out 20 points including ceasefire, hostage exchanges, demilitarisation of Gaza, transitional governance by technocrats under international supervision, and reconstruction. Under pressure from the world and its own citizens who feel that the campaign endangers the hostages, Israel accepted the plan. 

Will peace hold? This is a question on everyone’s mind across the world, and certainly across the lines in the middle-east. 

Outlook has been covering the latest Israel-Gaza conflict since it began on October 7. 

In the January 11, 2024 issue, We Bear Witness, we published ‘Zainab’s Gaza Journal’.  Seventy-year-old lawyer, researcher, and director Zainab Al Ghonaimy described how her morning ritual began with checking her internet connection — the only way she could stay in touch with her daughter, Farah Barqawi, in Brooklyn. In her journal, she documented the first 11 days of the war as it unfolded.

In ‘In Transit: A Palestinian Shares His Journey Of Escape From Gaza’, Zak writes about how Palestinians have been in transit since their grandparents were expelled from their homes during the Nakba of 1948.

In Outlook Magazine’s January 11, 2025 issue, War and Peace, Editor-in-Chief Chinki Sinha reflects in her piece Song for His Disappeared Love on the difficulty of asking a Palestinian journalist to write an account — a journalist who had just lost his wife and two young sons in an Israeli attack.

That account —‘I Want To Write My Story’: An Unfinished Despatch From Gaza' by Motasem Dalloul — remains unfinished, containing just two haunting sentences: “I lost my wife, two sons, sister, brother and 43 nieces and nephews, in addition to 13 cousins.

In 'A Palestinian Poet And Indian Author Exchange Notes On War', a Palestinian poet and Indian author exchange notes on war chronicles the correspondence between two authors across time zones—Naveen Kishore, founder of the independent Indian publishing house Seagull Books, and Palestinian poet and author Ghassan Zaqtan. They write to each other about the human cost of war.

The December 11, 2023, issue titled ‘trapped’ examines those left caught in the collective failure to act against unfolding historical crises, as the path to peace in Gaza becomes ever more tortuous, with old strategies buried beneath the debris of new wars.

In ‘How a Dangerous Mix of Theology and Geopolitics Have Led to the Abandonment of Palestinians’, A. Faizur Rahman discusses an overlooked aspect of the October 7 Hamas attack: it gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the pretext to pursue his long-declared goal of annexing all Palestinian territories—a move he had signalled publicly even before the war began.

Brahma Prakash, mentioned in ‘Resistance of Lullaby’, explores maternal lullabies shared between mothers, grandmothers, and children—the sound of lullabies so deep it endures across the landscape, refusing to die even in death.