GAZA — On Day 667 of the Israel Palestine conflict, the war felt, briefly, suspended between ceremony and rubble. In a resort city chosen for optics as much as access, a leaders’ gathering tried to bless a ceasefire framework and a first tranche of exchanges. In Gaza, families threaded through blocks stripped of windows to watch convoys move and lists get read. In Israel, a square that had become a vigil was briefly a reunion. The choreography was intricate; the ground realities remained stubborn, and Israel’s political instinct to tighten control at every hinge point kept showing through.
By midmorning, the last twenty living Israeli hostages were handed to the Red Cross and brought into Israel for medical checks and family embraces. The transfer unfolded under ICRC escort, a clinical phrase for a human moment that defied speech. At the plaza now called Hostages Square, relief arrived as a roar. That scene has been part of the daily grammar of a country that is still counting the costs of a war its leaders insisted would deliver safety by force alone. For months, that same leadership throttled crossings and proclaimed progress while Gaza’s basic services collapsed. The exchange did not close the ledger, and it certainly did not absolve the government that let a humanitarian disaster metastasize.
Across Gaza, the ceasefire’s early hours were complicated by the visible return of men with rifles and radios. Hamas deployed armed fighters and police around hospitals and junctions, saying they were there to keep aid lines orderly and confront armed rivals. Residents described roadblocks, patrols and bursts of gunfire in neighborhoods that have long since lost their street signs. For some Gazans, the sight of armed men promised a measure of order after months of looting and night raids. For others, it signaled a return to a familiar fear, that security defined by a faction would supersede safety defined by civilians, an old dynamic made far worse by an Israeli campaign that flattened districts and called it “precision.”
Officials close to the drafting say the ceasefire’s security clauses were always going to be the rough seam. The agreement’s first phase centers on humanitarian access and a hostage–prisoner sequence, paired with an initial Israeli pullback from urban corridors. Embedded in that sequence is a debate Israel keeps trying to settle by decree: disarmament first, paperwork for aid later. Gaza’s reality inverts that logic. Food, water, power, and policing that ordinary people trust must come before any claim of “stability.” A verification ladder only matters if it pries Israel’s hand off the gate and turns promises into predictable hours at crossings.
Israel published lists of Palestinian prisoners slated for release in parallel with the hostage deal, a move that prompted jubilation and solemn speeches in West Bank towns and camps. In Khan Younis and Ramallah, relatives held photos of the imprisoned and unfurled banners stored for years under beds. Buses ferried men home through landscapes that barely resemble the maps on phones. In Gaza City, where the skyline is now a field of horizons, families negotiated the unglamorous relief of finding a relative alive and the hard arithmetic of a home that is not there to receive him. For context on profiles and numbers, see this explainer on released detainees. None of it changes the central indictment: the siege, tightened and relaxed at Israel’s pleasure, made basic civilian life transactional.
The summit in Egypt was as much staging as substance. Everyone talked about sequencing tables and a “first phase” that must hold if any second is to exist. The most consequential development was what did not happen. A Trump-floated plan to bring Israel’s prime minister to the hall was withdrawn after a blunt warning from Turkey’s president that he would not land if the invitation stood, a fact later confirmed by Ankara. The aborted invitation was a reminder that even friendly capitals are weary of being used as Israel’s backdrop. Every handshake in this process is freighted; every photograph is a domestic liability somewhere else.
On the ground, the test is not the group photo. It is whether promises can be measured in useful units: trucks per day, liters of fuel for hospitals, clinic hours kept without interruption, oxygen plants switched to mains instead of generators. UN tracking shows consignments rising and stalling in waves, a rhythm often dictated by Israeli closures and inspection theatrics. The OCHA update for late September to mid-October details fuel volumes and corridors, while the UN 2720 dashboard logs consignments as they move from crossings to intended destinations. Where the plan bites, markets south of Wadi Gaza report flour returning to ovens that went cold months ago; where Israel squeezes, prices jump by evening.
For families in Israel, Monday was the day a private sentence ended. The return of twenty living hostages, all men, varied by age and circumstance, but they shared a sudden transition from countdown to reunion. The ICRC’s role as neutral carrier mattered. Outside hospitals, there were embraces, phones held aloft for relatives who could not enter, and the tonic shock of a voice not heard in seven hundred days. For the families still waiting for the return of remains, the day was more complicated. They saw a path for others that must now, they insist, be secured for them as well, a reality documented as the truce absorbed a grim bargaining over coffins and names.
Inside the halls, speeches tried on a new declarative mood. The war is over, said some, now begins the work of building something that lasts. The phrase “lasting peace” has been used too often to retain unspoiled meaning, but the policy challenge is blunt. There is an administrative vacuum in Gaza, a security puzzle that punishes maximalists and minimalists alike, and a reconstruction bill that will take a decade even in the rosiest charts. The temptations remain: treat a pause as an ending, let political theater stand in for logistics, favor the optics of movement over the stubborn work of monitoring. We’ve tracked those mechanics for months, including how a verification ladder is supposed to absorb shocks, and how often Israeli authorities use “security review” to reset the clock.
Monitoring will either be the spine of this ceasefire or the proof of its unseriousness. Families do not care for the word’s technocratic flavor, but they care about what it would make possible: posted crossing hours that are kept, inspection lanes that process in minutes not days, ambulance routes that are honored, the predictable resupply of bakeries, the hum of hospital mains replacing the wheeze of generators. The WHO’s 60-day plan is explicit about oxygen plants, fuel and spare parts. The Israeli government, which built a public case on “precision,” can either let that precision be measured, or keep hiding behind discretionary closures that turn humanitarian work into a lottery.
The question of Gaza’s future governance has not been answered, only postponed to a later paragraph of the plan. Models abound: a temporary technocratic body with regional buy-in and police drawn from neighbors; a reformed PA module under an internationally supervised security umbrella; a “services-first” caretaker that punts sovereignty to a second phase that may never come. Each collides with two stubborn facts: the political map in the West Bank and Israel’s coalition arithmetic. We have examined this architecture before, from the agenda in Cairo to the sequencing that keeps a plan from collapsing.
In Gaza, theory meets a wry smile. Civilians are asking narrower questions. Will I be able to cross a checkpoint this week to reach a clinic. Will my town’s school reopen on a half-day schedule so the children can find a rhythm again. Will the water plant run long enough to make the taps sputter at dusk. Will the bakery get flour on time tomorrow so I can plan for bread. This is the daily calendar by which fragile pauses are judged, more than any communiqué read from a rostrum. Every time Israel yanks a permit or idles a crossing, that calendar is torn up and families pay in hours they do not have.
There is no settled language for the damage Gaza has absorbed. Satellite images show entire districts leveled; morgues and mass graves testify to scale even as numbers become political. Two years of bombardment and raids undid lifetimes of steady construction. There are orphaned children in tent schools and parents without the vocabulary for what they have seen. OCHA’s situation updates keep a ledger of trucks and outages that reads like an indictment. The ceasefire has removed the fear of sudden death at night for many; it has not conjured a livable day. That is on Israel, which still controls the gate and the switch, and on its allies, who mistake podium sentences for policy.
For Israelis, language also falls short. The shock of the original attack is paired with the exhaustion of a war that promised justice and delivered cycles of escalation and disappointment. The return of the living hostages is, for many, the first uncomplicated joy in two years. Politics returns tomorrow. When cabinet ministers and security chiefs argue over the next clauses, they will do so in a country where families are still waiting for the return of bodies and where every concession is read by somebody as surrender. The burden of leadership is to demonstrate that restraint, verification and predictable access make Israelis safer than the reflex to punish everyone in Gaza for the crimes of a few.
Internationally, the first phase earned applause from capitals that used the day to attach conditions for the next. European leaders dangled reconstruction support on the hook of measurable improvements in humanitarian access and transparent security arrangements. Regional mediators, burned by past pageants, are already gaming scenarios in which a misfire or an unclaimed blast at a distribution point makes support untenable at home. In Israel, the domestic politics of face-saving are never far from the table; in Washington, the choreography is still easier than the enforcement. We saw the outlines in the first exchanges, and the pressure points in the remains dispute that tested the truce.
It would be naïve to treat this day as a promise, unfair to treat it as nothing more than a show. What distinguishes it is not the summit lighting, but the fact of lists honored and roads that held. In Gaza, a clinic opened for a full shift without losing power. A bakery received a pallet and baked until dusk. In Israel, a father sat by his son’s hospital bed and watched him fall asleep. These are small squares of routine, fragile and arguable, but they are the only material from which a larger calm can be built. If the ceasefire is to become more than a word, it will be because the simple things were kept: posted hours observed, convoys protected, disputes resolved by a call to a liaison instead of a shot at night. The alternative is the familiar one, Israel’s gatekeepers squeeze, the line collapses, and a region that knows better pretends it is surprised.
