Gaza’s disarmament trap
Hamas militants show force during the handing over of hostage bodies to the Red Cross in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 20 February 2025
Muhammad Shehada writes in +972 on 29 April 2026:
In a bombed-out, multi-story building in the Tal Al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, my friend Anas, his wife, and their 3-year-old daughter are sheltering in a first-floor apartment with no doors or windows. Most of the walls are either fully or partially collapsed along with a large part of the living room’s ceiling. In the center of the floor, there is a deep hole carved out by an unexploded 2000-pound Israeli bomb.
The building is riddled with bullet holes. The top two floors were repeatedly bombed and shelled by Israeli tanks and drones, and the ground floor has been almost completely destroyed. The staircase no longer connects to the upper three floors, leaving the building at risk of collapsing at any moment. For now, it remains standing amid a sea of fully flattened buildings.
There is no electricity, no running water, and no sewage or functioning bathrooms. At night, Anas sleeps with one eye open to look out for rats and mice that could bite his daughter. Flies, mosquitoes, and cockroaches also roam the building, nesting in destroyed sewage lines and under the vast amounts of rubble. During the day, Anas and his wife spend their time looking for work or humanitarian aid; their successes are painfully rare, and barely enough to keep them alive.
All day long, they are haunted by the non-stop buzzing of Israeli drones flying overhead ready to shoot to kill, as well as the sounds of explosions, machine guns, and demolition work taking place behind the “Yellow Line” — the expanding boundary marking Israel’s direct occupation of more than half of Gaza’s territory, which it is systematically flattening.
This is actually the life of one of Gaza’s luckier families, for at least they have a roof over their heads. More than six months after the so-called “ceasefire” was signed, most Palestinians in the Strip are still living in flimsy plastic tents that drown when it rains, trap the suffocating heat inside when the sun shines too brightly, and risk being blown away by moderate winds.
My friends, family, and colleagues on the ground have been willing to put up with this so long as they believed it to be a temporary ordeal on the road toward a better future. Yet they are increasingly internalizing the grim reality that there is no end in sight to the deliberately unlivable conditions Israel has imposed on Gaza.
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Under phase one of the ceasefire, Hamas agreed to release all remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the Yellow Line, and an immediate end to “all military operations.”
After this, Israel was supposed to facilitate the entry into Gaza of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a minimum of 600 aid trucks per day, and 200,000 tents along with 60,000 temporary homes. From there, negotiations toward phase two of the ceasefire — which includes further Israeli withdrawals and the decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons — were supposed to begin.