The first real test of the Gaza ceasefire arrived with explosions, broken glass and another stretch of bodies on hospital floors. Israeli warplanes struck across the enclave after an attack that the army said killed two soldiers. By night, officials said the truce would resume and aid would again be let in. For families in central and southern Gaza, the day read as something simpler and uglier, a familiar pattern in which Washington speaks of peace while Israel bombs, and civilians pay a price that international law was meant to prevent.
Palestinian health authorities reported at least twenty six people killed, including a woman and a child. Residents in Nuseirat said a blast tore through a former school serving as shelter. The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas fighters, a tunnel and weapons depots after militants fired an anti tank missile and opened fire across a boundary that Israeli officials now call a yellow line under the truce. Strip away the euphemisms and the sequence is plain. Armed men fought soldiers. Israel answered by dropping munitions in neighborhoods filled with displaced people. That is the very conduct the Geneva Conventions are designed to outlaw. It is collective punishment, and by the plain meaning of the law and the reality on the ground, it bears the hallmarks of a war crime.
The American script, the Gaza reality
This ceasefire is the project of US President Donald Trump, who told reporters the truce remains intact and suggested Hamas leadership might not have sanctioned the attack. He also said he did not know whether Israel’s strikes were justified. That careful posture, tough words in one sentence and hedging in the next, is the familiar American script. It gives Israel political cover while withholding accountability. It puts Gaza’s civilians in the conditional tense, protected if, fed if, safe if. When Washington couples leverage with indulgence, the result on the ground is predictable. Aid trucks move or stop based on phone calls, and the rules of war become flexible whenever Israel decides they are.
Vice President JD Vance offered his own rationale, describing a constellation of Hamas cells and arguing that Gulf Arab states should deploy a stabilization force. That proposal asks other nations to absorb the risk created by American and Israeli choices. It turns Gaza into a proving ground for a security experiment that would place outside troops between desperate civilians and armed men, then call that peace. When violence is the consequence of a political design that keeps one side unaccountable, introducing new uniforms does not change the fact that civilians are being bombed in shelters. No regional force can legitimize strikes that hit a school or a market. No euphemism can launder that reality.
Bombing shelters is not enforcement, it is terror
Israeli leaders say they are enforcing a line and deterring violations. In practice, that has meant firing at built up areas and sending a message to a population that has nowhere left to run. The choice to strike around a former school full of displaced families is not a neutral application of force. It is an intentional use of fear to shape civilian movement. That is the essence of terror. Under international humanitarian law, militaries must distinguish between combatants and civilians and must choose means and methods that respect proportionality. Bombing near known mass shelters fails both tests. It is not defense. It is a war crime in spirit and in letter.
Inside Gaza, the ceasefire never felt like security. It felt like a bureaucratic pause, an interval during which people tried to repair doorways and look for medicine before the next round. On Sunday, families in Nuseirat described a brief window to shop for bread and canned food when the skies quieted, then another rush to stairwells when the air began to shake. In Khan Younis, relatives lifted the wounded on doors and bed frames, carried them over cratered streets to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and Nasser Hospital where generators buzzed and staff worked down corridors. By evening, the message from the sky was obvious. A truce is a piece of paper unless the most powerful party is forced to obey it.
Aid as bargaining chip
After the strikes, an Israeli security source said the United States pressed for humanitarian deliveries to resume on Monday. That is not a system that respects law. It is a political lever disguised as relief. If food, fuel and medicine depend on American intervention every time Israel suspends them, then civilians are trapped in a transactional economy of survival.
The Rafah crossing remains closed. Israel ties its reopening to conditions it says Hamas has not met. Hamas says bodies lie under rubble and that it lacks the equipment and access to recover them. Hunger indicators have hovered near famine classifications for months, aid groups say. The only constant is the same one Gazans have lived with for two years, American promises from a lectern and Israeli firepower from above.
The bodies proof test
Israel says Hamas has been slow to return the bodies of all twenty eight deceased hostages. Hamas says the bombardment buried the dead and scattered the chain of custody. The dispute is soaked in politics. Israeli officials point to delays as evidence that only force protects the truce. Militants in Gaza point to the demands as a pretext for keeping crossings sealed and for justifying new raids. For families, the argument reduces to a grim arithmetic. The dead are turned into leverage, and the living are told to wait while leaders measure progress in press conferences instead of in hospital wards. Under customary law, the obligation to facilitate the return of remains is not optional.
What the law requires, what Israel and Washington refuse
The laws of war do not exist to win arguments on television. They exist to prevent exactly what happened on Sunday, a state using overwhelming force in a dense civilian environment and calling it deterrence. The duty to distinguish is not optional. The duty to ensure proportionality is not a matter of political taste. When a strike hits a shelter for displaced people, the presumption is not ambiguity. The presumption is illegality. A state that cannot or will not prevent this outcome is in breach. A superpower that bankrolls and shields that state, and then shrugs when asked whether the strikes were justified, is complicit in the results.
Echoes of past impunity
The pattern is familiar. A ceasefire is announced with grand language. Within days, a clash occurs at a perimeter. Israel answers not with arrests or a limited tactical response but with airstrikes inside the strip. Washington calls for calm, insists the deal remains in place, and moves aid like a faucet. Israel then speaks publicly of drawing new lines on the ground, and the international press repeats the euphemisms. None of this changes the central fact. Gaza is still being bombed. Families still sleep on floors, power still fails, clinics still ration antibiotics, and the map still shrinks for civilians while expanding for military logic. Humanitarian routes that were sold as humanitarian corridors become switchable valves, not guarantees.
Trump’s politics, Gaza’s cost
President Trump cast this ceasefire as proof of his personal leverage. He also admitted he could not say whether Israel’s strikes were justified. That contradiction is the policy. It allows the White House to claim ownership of peace while outsourcing the violence that shreds it. It keeps American hands clean in the transcript, and blood on the ground where cameras cannot always go. This is not neutrality. It is permission. It tells Israel there is no real consequence for hitting populated areas. It tells Gazans their lives can be paused or resumed based on how useful they are to American talking points. It is a moral failure and a strategic one. No agreement built on impunity will hold.
Regional consequences, again
Egypt’s calculus around Rafah, Jordan’s domestic pressure, Lebanon’s combustible frontier, and the Gulf states’ balancing act all become harder when civilians in Gaza see a ceasefire that does not protect them. If a stabilization force ever materializes, it will inherit a poisoned mandate, separate fighters from civilians while tolerating airstrikes near shelters. That is a recipe for tragedy and for a wider war. It would turn Arab states into human shields for a policy drawn in Washington and enforced by Israel. It would ask them to carry responsibility for a violence they did not order and cannot control.
What civilians know
Families in Gaza have learned to pack bags that can be carried in seconds. Shopkeepers raise metal shutters, count a few customers and close again at the sound of jets. Nurses triage in hallways where the power flickers. Drivers time trips to crossing points based on rumors and text chains. Schools become shelters, then try to become schools again, desks pushed around mattresses. The choreography is precise because the margin for error is gone. A stray minute can be the difference between a kitchen and a crater. A ceasefire that does not change these routines is not a ceasefire. It is a pause between punishments.
The wrong lesson in Israel
In Israel, leaders speak of deterrence and of a line that will be marked and policed with fire. The lesson they are teaching, to their own public and to the world, is that international law is an option for weaker countries. A state with American backing can ignore it. That will not make Israel safer. It will normalize responses that treat civilian neighborhoods as acceptable arenas for retribution. It will harden the very militancy Israel says it wants to defeat. Most of all, it will ensure that any truce becomes a countdown, not a path to safety.
Call things by their names
When a military drops ordnance near a shelter full of displaced families, the intent is to scare civilians into submission and movement. That is the definition of terror. When a state uses force that is foreseeably indiscriminate in a dense, civilian environment, that is a war crime. These are not slogans. They are descriptions written into law by societies that survived the last century’s atrocities and tried to prevent a repeat. Sunday in Gaza was not a mystery. It was a choice. Israel chose to respond to a clash with force that predictably harmed civilians. The United States chose to accept it and to restart aid only after the damage was done. The world should stop pretending that this is complicated.
The only path that is real
If there is to be a ceasefire that deserves the name, it must begin with rules that bind Israel as tightly as they bind anyone in Gaza who carries a weapon. It must include a mechanism to investigate strikes on civilian sites immediately and publicly, with consequences that are not waived by American preference. It must treat humanitarian access as non negotiable and permanent, not as a chip to be toggled. And it must confront the political truth that any future for Gaza requires ending the system that has made siege and displacement the architecture of daily life.
What Sunday changed
By nightfall, officials could say the ceasefire remained in place. That was technically true. Trucks would move again. A line would be enforced. Delegations would land. But the people who live under the planes know what changed. The truce is now revealed for what it is in practice, an agreement enforced by the party with the bombs and interpreted by a superpower that refuses to say no. Civilians were told to trust a process that did not protect them when it was tested. They will remember that the next time the sky goes quiet. They will remember who called this peace, and what it felt like.
The cost of American indulgence
Two years of war have already written a ledger that cannot be balanced. The killings on Sunday add another line. The White House can claim leverage. Israel can claim deterrence. Neither claim provides a blanket for a child on a hospital floor. Neither claim satisfies the requirements of law. Until the United States is willing to condition its support on true compliance, and until Israel is forced to respect the rights of the people it bombs and confines, there will be more days like this one. The words will change. The bodies will not.
