EDITORIAL: A year after the US-brokered ceasefire agreement of October 2025, Gaza remains engulfed in suffering. More than 1,400 Palestinians have reportedly been killed since the truce began, while thousands of families remain trapped in overcrowded displacement camps, exposed to continuing airstrikes, disease and acute shortages of food, clean water, and essential medicines. Yet the crisis is not merely a failure to uphold a ceasefire. The deeper issue is Gaza’s territorial future and the fundamental rights of its Palestinian population.
Despite the agreement, Israel has moved to expand its military control over approximately 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip. Reconstruction remains stalled, humanitarian assistance falls far short of what is needed, and displaced Palestinians face the grim uncertainty of whether they will ever return to their homes. What was supposed to be a temporary military arrangement increasingly threatens to become a permanent territorial reality, further entrenching Palestinian dispossession.
These fears are reinforced by the declared ambitions of senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has advocated the gradual annexation of Gaza, full Israeli control and the establishment of Jewish settlements. In June, he said plans for three settlements in the territory had been prepared and awaited Netanyahu’s approval. Defence Minister Israel Katz has also made statements suggesting a continuing Israeli military presence, although he subsequently denied that the government intended to establish civilian settlements. Such pronouncements, considered alongside the expansion of military control, lend weight to fears that the ceasefire is being exploited to consolidate territorial gains. The settler-colonial character of this project lies in the prospect of entrenching control over Palestinian land while denying its indigenous population the freedom to determine its own future.
The implications extend beyond Gaza. They form part of a wider struggle over Palestinian land, sovereignty, and national existence, against a backdrop of settlement expansion and annexationist ambitions in the occupied West Bank. Any attempt to acquire territory by force, or to transfer an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory, raises grave questions under international law. The prospect of a broader “Greater Israel” project, advanced by many in Tel Aviv , makes international scrutiny all the more urgent.
The United States, as the principal broker of the ceasefire and Israel’s most powerful international ally, cannot escape responsibility for the agreement’s failure to deliver meaningful peace. Washington must press for an end to attacks on civilians, unrestricted humanitarian access, Israeli military withdrawal and reconstruction under credible international oversight. Yet expectations of decisive US action are vain while Washington’s domestic political considerations continue to shield Israel from meaningful accountability.
Gaza’s people deserve more than a ceasefire that leaves their land under expanding military control and their future hostage to Israeli ambitions. Decades of Palestinian resistance testify to the enduring refusal to accept dispossession as a permanent condition. Unless the international community confronts the territorial ambitions underlying this conflict, diplomacy may merely freeze the struggle rather than resolve it. No lasting peace can be built on the denial of Palestinian rights.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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