Even though Israeli airstrikes killed at least 109 people in Gaza on Tuesday — most of them civilians, 46 of them children — U.S. President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed deliverer of “Peace in the Middle East,” maintains that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas still holds.
Among Palestinians in Gaza who survived Tuesday’s attacks, however, there is a growing belief that the ceasefire agreement exists only on paper, providing diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue to kill.
The Intercept asked 60 residents in Gaza, many of them students living in Gaza City, whether they believed the ceasefire still held. Fifty said no. Four said the ceasefire was still in place, but it was fragile and at risk of falling apart. Six expressed hope that the ceasefire would remain.
Residents described nights filled with explosions and mornings shadowed by tension, as Gaza braced itself for what may come next.
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“I panicked and my body shook violently,” said 20-year-old Aya Nasser, a university student who recalled Tuesday’s attacks to The Intercept. She was in bed when, just after midnight, she heard an Israeli missile explode 30 meters from her home. A second followed shortly after.
Nasser said she later learned that the Israeli strike had hit a nearby home and killed nine people from a single family: a grandmother, a father, a daughter-in-law, four children, and two grandchildren.
Nasser said this was the third time an Israeli attack had targeted her neighborhood in the Al-Nuseirat camp since the ceasefire went into effect. She did not think it was still in place. “The fear is indescribable,” she said, anticipating further attacks.
“The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”
When Israel announced its strikes on Tuesday, Hala, also 20, had been shopping at a market for her upcoming wedding. She rushed back to her home in Nuseirat and eventually fell asleep to relative calm. But she was jolted awake when a missile struck their neighbor’s home, which caught on fire. Hours later, she received word that another strike had killed her fiancé’s cousin, along with his wife and children. Only their 7-year-old son survived.
For now, Hala said the wedding has been postponed while their neighborhood remains under threat of future attacks.
“There is no ceasefire,” she said. “The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”
Israel claimed its attacks on Tuesday had targeted senior Hamas fighters. However, the vast number of children killed and wounded in the strikes told a different story.
Morten Rostrup, a physician working with Doctors Without Borders at al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City, said after Israel’s airstrikes, he treated many wounded children in the hospital’s emergency room.
“There is no doubt this is an attack on civilians,” he said. “Do we really call this a ceasefire?” A Doctors Without Borders spokesperson said their teams had treated 242 patients wounded from the attacks, with 49 later dying in treatment.
Tuesday’s bombing forced 28-year-old teacher Esraa and her small children out of their home in Al-Zawaida, which had already been damaged by previous attacks. In the middle of the night, she and her children went to stay in a tent with her parents and other relatives. She said they spent the evening with no access to water. “My baby clung to me tightly the whole time, crying,” she recalled.
“They keep bombing and killing people and then declare that the so-called ceasefire is still going on.”
A 20-year-old writer and student, also named Esraa, called the ceasefire “just a declaration, not reality.” The bombs on Tuesday woke her up late at night while in her home in Nuseirat, triggering memories of the previous two years of war.
“They keep bombing and killing people and then declare that the so-called ceasefire is still going on,” she said. “How so, while lots of people are still losing family members?”
Even after the Israeli military said it resumed the ceasefire on Wednesday morning, it carried out another airstrike in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area in the evening, killing two more people. In addition to its military barrages, Israel continues to restrict the amount of humanitarian aid to enter the Strip, choking its depleted markets, leaving food unaffordable for many.
In the first few weeks of the previous ceasefire deal brokered in January, Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza,before shattering the deal completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. What 20-year-old student Ali Skaik fears most, he said, is that the situation in Gaza would mirror the ceasefire in Lebanon, where despite having a supposed peace deal with Hezbollah in place for almost a year, Israel has continued to attack and has killed more than 100 civilians.
After the ceasefire, Skaik moved into his grandfather’s home in eastern Gaza City to the Al-Zaytouna neighborhood, which sits near the border of Israel’s yellow line. The Israeli military maintains control of portions of land on the other side. Every night for the past week, Skaik said, he’s heard explosions stretching from 10 p.m. until the morning.
“For that reason, I never really felt that there was a complete ceasefire in place,” he said.
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The 109 Gazans killed Tuesday represent roughly half of the 200 Palestinians Israel has killed since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. Throughout the genocide, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry — though the true count is likely much higher. As many as 14,500 others also remain missing, whether killed in airstrikes and buried beneath rubble, abducted by Israeli military forces, or disappeared under other circumstances.
Bodour, 20, a university student, said he has grown accustomed to living through Israel’s ceasefire violations and has learned to mistrust Israel’s “speeches and pursuit of peace,” finding “strange comfort” in always expecting the worst from Netanyahu’s government.
“What ceasefire are we talking about?” Bodour said. He laughed when asked the question about whether there was still a ceasefire in Gaza. “The scattered bodies? The destroyed houses? The orphaned children?”
“What ceasefire are we talking about? The scattered bodies? The destroyed houses? The orphaned children?”
Israel reportedly notified the Trump administration before conducting its strikes on Tuesday, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused Hamas of failing to return the remains of deceased Israeli hostages and firing on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. Hamas has denied responsibility for the attacks.
As bombs began to rain down on Gaza, Trump, on a trip to Japan, told reporters inside Air Force One that he supported Israel’s strikes. “The Israelis hit back and they should hit back,” Trump said, blaming Hamas for an Israeli soldier’s death. At the same time, he insisted that “nothing’s going to jeopardize” the ceasefire. Vice President JD Vance minimized Tuesday’s bombings as “little skirmishes here and there.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously predicted there would be “bumps along the road, but we have to make it work.”
“Those ‘bumps’ are ‘Israel gets to violate the ceasefire wherever it sees fit,’” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “As long as it doesn’t return to that full-blown, full-on assault or a full-on blockade.”
Trump has much to gain from continuing to tell the public that the ceasefire is holding, even while Israel kills dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout his second term, Trump has positioned himself as a so-called “peacemaker,” and his inner circle, including his son-in-law and ceasefire negotiating team member Jared Kushner, have voiced interest in development projects in Gaza to reap a profit in the wake of Israel’s destruction. Trump has further expressed interest in leveraging the ceasefire in an attempt to finish the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israel’s relationships with Arab countries — and fast-track Trump’s policy goals and personal financial interests.
“For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past.
The ceasefire plan, in many ways, was Trump’s way for providing diplomatic cover for Israel, which had been under increasing pressure from the international community amid images of famine and genocide, to allow it to continue its military control over the Strip, Kenney-Shawa said.
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“I think none of us should be surprised that Israel has continued breaking the ceasefire,” Kenney-Shawa said. “It very much still fits into the Trump administration’s bigger picture, because as long as they can kind of say that there is a quote-unquote ‘ceasefire’ in effect, as long as they can say, ‘At least it’s better than before,’ that enables the U.S. and the rest of the international community to let up on the pressure on Israel and to return to business as usual.”
Israel has also spent the ceasefire demolishing structures within parts of Gaza it continues to occupy. Kenney-Shawa said such tactics are meant to make the Strip even more uninhabitable to ultimately force Palestinians out of Gaza, the ultimate goal of Israel’s campaign.
“For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire.”
The morning after Tuesday’s bombings, Tasneem, a 25-year-old homemaker in Gaza, accused Trump of lying, asking, “Where is the ceasefire they talk about?”
Said, 26, an English teacher in Gaza, said that even with the ceasefire in place, he has felt “constant exhaustion and misery,” given the ongoing attacks. He dismissed the term “ceasefire” as “just a media trick.”
There is still recognition in Gaza that the frequency and scale of Israel’s attacks since the ceasefire have decreased from the two previous years of genocide. Tuesday’s bombings, however, returned things back to the pre-ceasefire average daily death toll of 100, shattering illusions of peace. The uncertainty is crippling for many.
Mervat, a 51-year-old homemaker, said she feared the resumed attacks would again displace her and her family, and that they would again face famine conditions. She said as long as Israel’s occupation continues, “there is no safety.”
“Simply knowing that the agreement is still in place offers a psychological reassurance,” said Aseel, a 20-year-old university student in Gaza. “Yet, news of its violation or the return of genocide imposes an unimaginable weight and traps you in an endless cycle of worry.”
Believers in Islam are encouraged to maintain hope and trust in Allah’s mercy, and many people who spoke to The Intercept said they had hope that Allah would restore the ceasefire, but currently they don’t see it as in place.
Hend, 21, another university student, said she’d lost trust in the agreement. Though she felt the ground shake during Tuesday’s bombings, she said she still has “hope for peace, and that we can feel safe.”
Such hope began to fade after Tuesday’s attacks, said Marah, a 22-year-old English literature student at Islamic University of Gaza. She said there can only be peace in Gaza with the removal of Israeli occupation in the territory.When the ceasefire went into effect, she said, “I tried to reclaim even a small part of life before October 7, but everything collapsed again in an instant. Fear returned, along with the sounds of bombing and the smell of death.”
The post We Asked People in Gaza What They Think of the Ceasefire: “Just a Declaration, Not Reality” appeared first on The Intercept.
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