Medical teams pray beside the covered remains and bodies of unidentified Palestinians, returned by Israel, before their mass burial outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, on 22 October 2025. The return of deceased Palestinian prisoners by Israel is part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that took effect on 10 October 2025. (Photo: EPA / Haitham Imad) 
The Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, involving US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, remains extremely fragile. Since the ceasefire was brokered about two weeks ago, Israeli security forces have killed about 100 Palestinians in Gaza.
Dozens of Palestinians were killed in the first few days after the ceasefire when they tried to return to their homes situated near the 52% of the coastal territory still occupied by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with the latter saying they felt threatened, The New Arab and NBC reported.
Before this semi-withdrawal, Israeli soldiers set dozens of Palestinian homes and buildings on fire, according to Drop Site News and the Middle East Eye.
The situation escalated last weekend as Israeli air strikes over Gaza killed many more Palestinians.
This followed continuing clashes between Hamas gunmen and Palestinian gangs in Rafah in the south of the occupied territory. There were reports of Israeli soldiers trying to protect the gangs, many with criminal backgrounds, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted to arming and supporting, The Guardian reported.
Two Israeli soldiers were also killed in Rafah. Israel accused Hamas of firing anti-tank missiles towards Israeli soldiers, but the cause of the death of the two soldiers has been disputed.
Israel claimed initially that they had been killed by Hamas gunmen emerging from tunnels. However, it was later reported by investigative journalist Ryan Grim from Drop Site News that his official US sources had acknowledged that the soldiers had been killed when an Israeli military vehicle drove over unexploded ordnance.
Hamas has been trying to reassert security control over Gaza and carried out summary street executions of suspected gang members and possibly political opponents. This has raised concerns about its eventual disarmament as outlined in the Gaza ceasefire deal, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and verified by CNN News.
Israel accuses Hamas of dragging its feet in returning the bodies of dead Israeli hostages. But Quds News Network reported that Hamas said Israel had not allowed the entry of excavation experts and the equipment needed to dig through more than 60 million tonnes of rubble, underneath which there are reported to be at least 10,000 Palestinian bodies. AP quoted Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, Ahmad Abdul-Hadi, as saying that the organisation had asked for this equipment.
Contrary to the ceasefire agreement, Israel has kept the Rafah crossing into Egypt closed and also limited the amount of aid entering Gaza. Netanyahu said on Sunday that all aid would cease, before reversing this decision under American pressure, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Avigdor Lieberman, chairperson of opposition party Yisrael Beytenu, called for the war on Gaza to be resumed, The Times of Israel reported. Israel broke the previous ceasefire in March, NBC reported, flouting the previous agreement by refusing to move on to the following stages of that ceasefire deal.
Hamas has been afraid that after it released the hostages, Israel would resume the war – a fear underscored by analysts. The New York Times reported that Israel’s main aim over the past two years has been to secure the release of Israeli captives, thereby giving it a free hand to continue any military action it deems necessary in Gaza.
Over the past two years, Hamas offered several times to release all the Israelis in exchange for a full Israeli military withdrawal and an end to the war, The Times of Israel reported – an offer Israel repeatedly refused. Israeli security leaders, opposition members and family members of the Israeli captives stated that Netanyahu deliberately delayed a deal with Hamas to serve his own political interests and survival, Anadolu reported.
The main problem is that the ceasefire deal, even if it does hold, is short on detail and ambiguous.
Professor Marc Weller, senior researcher on security, international law and governance at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank, said it was clear that no actual peace agreement yet exists.
Weller said that normally after a first step – in which the sides agree the base points for a settlement in the form of a declaration of principles – the next step involves a framework agreement, where the interests of the sides are carefully balanced to give both an interest in sticking with the agreement.
“This would be supplemented by detailed annexes on the modalities for implementation, along with the deployment of an international military and civilian presence,” Weller explained.
“However, to move this vision forward, it is necessary to progress the actual peace process. Instead, the Trump plan has seen an outside power, the US, issue the basic principles for a settlement. Neither side was fully supportive. Both were pressed into acceptance by key Western, Islamic and Arab states.”
It’s also still unclear how a transitional government for Gaza would be formed and who would run it.
Rajan Menon, professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, added in The Guardian that disputes over the extent and pace of the withdrawals by the IDF could also jeopardise the ceasefire.
“The plan heightens this risk by failing to specify a timeline for the IDF’s remaining disengagements – or who will ensure their implementation, and how,” said Menon.
Gaza will also have to be rehabilitated if a future peace is to be secured. About $70-billion will be needed to reconstruct Gaza and make it safe after two years of war, UN development experts said.
ReliefWeb reports that since October 2023, more than 67,000 Palestinians have been reportedly killed in Gaza and more than 169,841 injured.
According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), at least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli detention since 7 October 2023. In at least 12 of these cases severe beatings were recorded, according to autopsy reports, and 22 had prior medical conditions and were denied medication.
“Israeli authorities have deliberately imposed conditions of detention that amount to torture or other forms of ill-treatment and have contributed to the deaths of detainees, while the culture of impunity and the denial of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access have predictably fostered extreme violence against Palestinians in Israeli jails,” said the OHCHR.
Euro-Med Monitor’s field team monitored the Israeli authorities’ handover of the bodies of 120 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip through the ICRC.
“Medical examinations, forensic reports and observations by the field team revealed conclusive evidence that many victims were killed after being detained. Their bodies bore clear marks of hanging, rope imprints around their necks, injuries from close-range gunfire, bound hands and feet with plastic restraints, and blindfolds. Some bodies were crushed under tank tracks,” said Euro-Med.
Trump’s plan also fails to deal with the core issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the Israel occupation and its refusal to recognise a Palestinian state. Netanyahu is on record as repeatedly saying there will never be a Palestinian state. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
