Gaza City — the promise of quiet arrived in whispers before dawn and then, suddenly, as a chorus. In Gaza’s battered neighborhoods, families murmured that the guns might go silent. In Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, the electronic counter that had ticked away the days since October 7 disappeared, replaced by a simple conviction: loved ones were coming home. The first phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, pushed by Washington and Arab mediators, has unlocked exchanges of people and pledges, but it has not yet delivered certainty. After two years of deadlock and grief, the war’s long tail is now a tangle of logistics, forensics, and politics that could still snap the deal back into crisis.
In the opening days, the public mood oscillated between relief and restraint. The living Israeli hostages who remained in captivity were delivered into the care of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which confirmed transfers to Israeli authorities, alongside coordinated returns of Palestinian detainees to Gaza and the West Bank. The humanitarian choreography, as the International Committee of the Red Cross described it, included the solemn handover of deceased hostages and Palestinians with an emphasis on dignity and documentation rather than spectacle. The organization set out its account of the exchanges and also noted its role in facilitating remains transfers. Those technical details mattered because they shaped everything that followed: access windows at crossings, aid convoys queued at inspection points, and families allowed to move for the first time in months.
The structure of this first phase is meant to be modular, a set of rungs that can be climbed even when one slips. Negotiators described a fixed clock for releases, mapped pullbacks to pre agreed lines inside Gaza, and an initial surge of food and fuel meant to stabilize clinics and shelters. In Washington, the plan has been framed as a proof of concept, a stress test of promises that bind allies and rivals to a timetable rather than a slogan, an approach we explored in our analysis of the plan’s accountability design.
On the ground, theory met friction. The Rafah crossing became the sharpest point of leverage. Israeli officials tied reopening to verified returns of the bodies of deceased hostages. Hamas said many bodies lay beneath pancaked buildings and that excavation equipment and access were insufficient. The result was a stop and go pattern that left aid agencies recalculating schedules by the hour and families staring at shuttered gates. Our reporting showed how the gate turned into a bargaining chip over remains accounting, and how subsequent handovers briefly loosened the choke point and allowed more trucks to roll, as seen in a day when transfers nudged Rafah open. International wires tracked the same pattern, with Reuters reporting that Rafah would remain closed until further notice and PBS describing the anxiety around remains timing.
Even where gates opened, the pipeline sputtered. Relief groups said stockpiles outside Gaza could support the strip at scale if inspection lanes ran long enough each day. But convoys moved below the promised floors and time windows stayed narrow. The World Food Programme has set a baseline target of 150 trucks per day. United Nations situation updates tracked fuel consignments, cooking gas entries, and the uneven geography of access, including the Humanitarian Response Update for late September to mid October, the Situation Update number 331, and an earlier update on access trends.
Inside Gaza’s health network, the ceasefire calmed the skies at moments but could not reverse a year of damage. Hospital managers juggled generator hours. Oxygen plants tried to match production to erratic power. Shelters wrestled with diarrheal disease and respiratory infections incubated by crowding. The World Health Organization’s latest public health assessment warned of famine linked deaths, outbreaks, and a system at breaking point without predictable energy and supplies. The assessment is available in the Public Health Situation Analysis, while the organization has also detailed the strain across facilities and maintains an emergency reporting hub. UNICEF has flagged acute child malnutrition for months, and in May thousands of children were admitted for treatment, as noted in its June notice on admissions.
Politics on both sides of the border shifted with the first buses and ambulances. In Israel, families of hostages who had become a moral wedge in national debate found themselves organizing homecomings and funerals in the same week. In Gaza, where the need for quiet and access is overwhelming, the questions were intensely pragmatic, including who unlocks the water plant and keeps it unlocked, who issues permits, and who keeps the clinic hours posted on a door. The United States has argued that the plan’s virtue is its sequencing, movement for movement and list for list, and that the larger blueprint creates room for an interim security arrangement while governance questions are sorted. For a policy overview, see the Council on Foreign Relations guide to the twenty point plan.
Verification turned out to be the most consequential word in the vocabulary of this phase. Each verb, release, withdraw, deliver, document, came with a committee, a spreadsheet, and a clock. When an exchange stalled, mediators shifted to the next rung, adding inspectors at a crossing, revising a truck manifest, and agreeing on a radio channel to deconflict convoy routes with patrols. That work can sound colorless, but it is how a truce becomes a process. Our earlier reporting laid out how the system works in practice, from clinic hours kept to truck counts posted, and why publishing those metrics builds legitimacy with a public that has learned to distrust podiums.
The maritime conversation echoed the same anxieties about inspection and throughput. Activists tested the cordon at sea and Israeli forces responded with familiar interdiction tactics, setting off legal and diplomatic fights about what might constitute a lawful humanitarian corridor by water and who would inspect it. Our reporting on recent sea interceptions and subsequent deportations captured how the route by water became a stand in for the broader dispute over access and control.
As the clock ticked, the plan’s darker contingencies materialized. Israeli commanders accused militants of violating the pause near Rafah and Beit Lahia, strikes followed, and aid flows were briefly halted. Humanitarian deliveries resumed amid calls from Washington to restore access. We chronicled how retaliatory strikes rattled a fragile pause, while Reuters tracked aid pauses and resumptions that can make or break a first phase.
Abroad, capitals waited for proof of concept. European governments, scorched by domestic divisions over the war, welcomed breathing space but demanded durability. Arab states that signed on to the framework wanted results before investing political capital in later stages. The United Nations office for humanitarian coordination laid out a sixty day stabilization push to translate relief windows into predictable corridors, described in OCHA’s plan. Analysts at policy institutes tried to map what a non U N stabilization force might look like and how quickly it could deploy should that idea advance. The Council on Foreign Relations offers additional context on sequencing and a stabilization option.
None of this erases the ledger of loss. Gaza’s health data show a system hollowed out by months of bombardment, power cuts, and displacement. The World Health Organization has described a network operating on generators with too few supplies and staff, summarized in its briefing to the World Health Assembly. UNICEF’s reporting on child malnutrition has moved from warnings to treatment tallies. The aid math is simple and unforgiving, since shipments must meet monthly caloric needs for the whole population, not only the slice that reaches a distribution point on a given day, a problem reflected in the World Food Programme’s accounting of shortfalls.
The diplomatic math is not much friendlier. Israel’s governing coalition remains brittle, with security maximalists warning that any pullback invites future attacks and critics arguing that the country has tasted the relief of homecomings and will not accept a return to open ended ground campaigns. Palestinian politics are equally unresolved, since factions that endured and fought through the war are not likely to cede influence easily to a technocratic authority designed abroad. The only measure that wins legitimacy in Gaza now is whether fuel reaches the generator that powers the incubator, whether a clinic opens when the notice says it will, and whether a crossing behaves like a border rather than a theater.
For the families at the heart of the story, each day spells the difference between a promise and a kept schedule. In Tel Aviv, chants for medals for foreign leaders mingled with jeers for the prime minister. In the western sands of Gaza, a mother weighed whether to stand in line for water or on the other side of town for bread. An older man traced a finger along the edge of a tarp and remembered the concrete windowsills of his home in Gaza City. He said that people now live by schedules, a conditional tense that explains why crowds that shouted to life at midnight grew quiet by morning.
If the mechanism holds, the next steps, a deeper pullback, a more durable ceasefire, a credible path to governance, will not feel like a leap. They will read like the next lines on a checklist everyone already carries. That is the lesson of the first exchanges. Promises in this war have to be engineered. The people who have the least say in high rooms will decide whether the architecture survives. They will decide by showing up at distribution times, by sending children back to a school with half a roof, by choosing a bus to a home that may no longer be there, by standing again in a square that has taken on new meaning.
What success looks like in this first phase is not a single ceremony but the slow, repetitive proof that a truce can do things that airstrikes and raids cannot. It looks like truck counts posted at day’s end, fuel deliveries that match the needs of generators, clinic hours that hold. It looks like the steady expansion of inspection windows rather than the spectacle of one grand reopening. If enough of that tedium becomes normal, the larger questions, policing, borders, the day after, might for the first time in years be asked at a volume the region can bear.
