Nine days out of ten: a year of 'ceasefire' in Gaza that kept bombing

A ceasefire is supposed to be measured in silence. In Gaza, a year after the truce that took effect on 10 October 2025, it is being measured in the days when the bombing did not stop. An accounting published this week found that Israel attacked Gaza on nine days out of ten during the so-called ceasefire, a rhythm that makes the word itself hard to use without quotation marks.

The human count behind that rhythm is not abstract. A Council of Europe committee, marking the same anniversary, said more than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed over the past twelve months, and put the toll since October 2023 at over 73,000, including more than 21,000 children. United Nations officials, speaking at the third anniversary of the 7 October attacks, said civilians in Gaza continue to endure intolerable conditions, that aid restrictions remain in place, and that almost daily deadly attacks continue despite the relief the ceasefire was meant to bring.

That gap between the paper truce and the lived one has a material side. Cargo entry has been suspended on some days for stated security reasons, while agencies say the volume of food, medicine and shelter material remains below what a population living among ruins requires. A family does not eat a communique. It eats what crosses the border, on the day it crosses, at a price it can pay, and no declaration changes the maths of an empty kitchen.

Israel maintains that its operations target militants and respond to violations. Palestinians and a growing list of European and UN voices answer that a truce enforced mainly on one side is not a truce but a management of violence at a lower, steadier tempo. The argument is no longer only about a single strike. It is about whether international law, written precisely for civilians trapped between armies, can be suspended by vocabulary.

Three years after the attacks that began this war, and one year after the ceasefire that was supposed to narrow it, Gaza's question remains the simplest one. If people are still being killed almost every day, still queuing for aid that arrives irregularly, and still burying children, in what sense has the war paused for them. A ceasefire that does not cease fire is a sentence the world keeps reading aloud while Gaza lives inside it.