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ceasefire
67 Children Have Been Killed in Gaza Since 'Ceasefire' Began, as Israel Committed Hundreds of Violations
“This is during an agreed ceasefire," a UNICEF spokesperson said. "The pattern is staggering."
Nov 21, 2025
Eight children have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza over the past two days. They are among 67 children who have been killed since last month's agreement for a "ceasefire" in Gaza was signed, according to a new report from the United Nations Children's Fund.
“Yesterday morning, a baby girl was reportedly killed in Khan Younis by an airstrike, while the day before, seven children were killed in Gaza City and the south,” said UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires on Friday.
The seven children were among dozens of Palestinians who were killed or injured by an Israeli quadcopter attack in Gaza City on Wednesday, according to Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
“At around 11:00 am, we heard gunfire from quadcopters,” said Zaher, an MSF nurse working at a mobile clinic in Gaza City. “Shortly after, we received two casualties. The first was a woman with a leg injury. A little later, a 9-year-old girl arrived with an injury on her face caused by gunfire from the quadcopters.”
Last month, Israel signed an agreement with Hamas that required both parties to cease hostilities with one another. But since the deal went into effect on October 11, Israel has carried out attacks in Gaza on 35 of the last 42 days.
The Gaza Media Office alleges that Israel has committed nearly 400 ceasefire violations in just over a month—which have included airstrikes, shellings, and direct shootings of civilians, as well as frequent incursions by Israel past the agreed-upon yellow withdrawal lines. At least 312 Palestinians have been killed and 760 injured.
“This is during an agreed ceasefire," Pires emphasized to reporters. "The pattern is staggering,”
Shortly after Pires' announcement, Israel launched a new ground invasion across the yellow line on Friday afternoon, which has reportedly left another displaced person dead near Khan Younis and thousands more people in North Gaza neighborhoods fleeing for their lives.
After two years of genocidal warfare, over 20,000 Palestinian children are confirmed to have been killed, while another 3,000 to 4,000 have lost either one or both of their limbs.
“As we have repeated many times, these are not statistics: Each was a child with a family, a dream, a life–suddenly cut short by continued violence," Pires said.
Gaza's health infrastructure lies in disrepair following two years of relentless bombing, which left nearly all of its hospitals and clinics either partially or fully destroyed.
As another stipulation of the ceasefire deal, Israel was required to lift its blockade on humanitarian aid entering the strip, which had left the people of Gaza on the brink of starvation and unable to perform basic medical care.
But in retaliation for what Israel alleged was a failure by Hamas to return the remains of some hostages abducted by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, Israel cut off the largest port of entry for humanitarian aid, the Rafah Crossing, which remains closed.
After several weeks in which aid was nearly all choked off, the number of trucks entering the strip has increased in recent days. But according to the World Food Program (WFP), hundreds of thousands of people still remain in dire need of food assistance, and the amount currently entering the strip is far too little.
Only about 30% of WFP's target food parcels have been allowed to be distributed, though it says that it has been able to move that number upward more quickly in recent days.
Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the WFP, said that while this is “a step in the right direction... a lot of these food supplies stay in border crossing points for long days and therefore you know the possibility of them going bad is high.”
Pires said that as winter approaches, hundreds of thousands of children are “sleeping in the open” and “trembling in fear while living in flooded, makeshift shelters."
“For hundreds of thousands of children living in tents over the rubble of their former homes, the new [winter] season is a threat multiplier," he said. "Children are shivering through the night with no heating, no insulation, and too few blankets.”
As Gaza's medical system lies in ruin, UNICEF says over 4,000 children urgently need to be evacuated from the strip. But even after the ceasefire deal, Palestinian journalist Eman Abu Zayed reports in Truthout that securing medical referrals from the Israeli government and traveling for treatment outside the strip is a "near-impossible task."
“Gaza's doctors tell us of children they know how to save but cannot,” said Pires. He said they were children "with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, spinal injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and children with cancer who have lost months of treatment. Premature babies who need intensive care. Children who need surgeries that simply cannot be done inside Gaza today.”
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Who Is Ready to Die for Trump’s Gaza Plan? So Far, Nobody
We shall see in the coming days whether the corrupt governments that hope to profit from the genocide in Gaza will send their own troops to fight the Palestinian Resistance and perpetuate the Israeli occupation.
Nov 21, 2025
On November 17, 2025, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution to endorse President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, including a transitional government headed by Trump himself and an International Stabilization Force, or ISF, that is expected, among other tasks, to disarm Hamas, a task that Israel has failed to do through two years of genocide and mass destruction.
The ISF will be tasked with securing the borders in a way that confines Palestinians, stabilizing Gaza’s security environment by suppressing resistance, demilitarizing Gaza while leaving the Israeli regime untouched, and training the Palestinian police to control the population. Yes, the force is also mandated to “protect civilians” and assist humanitarian aid. But under US supervision, can anyone honestly expect it to restrain Israel when Israel simply refuses to comply—as we see with the current so-called “ceasefire”?
Hamas and other factions in Gaza have issued a joint statement that unequivocally rejects Trump’s plan and the Security Council resolution, saying it “will turn into a type of imposed guardianship or administration—reproducing a reality that restricts the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and to managing their own affairs.”
As for the foreign military force, the Hamas statement says, “Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”
This is not the time to give up on the real solutions to this crisis: justice and freedom for Palestine, and accountability for Israel.
The joint statement reserves its strongest condemnation for the Arab rulers who support Trump’s plan, calling their support “a form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the occupation against our people.”
Trump has claimed that all sides agreed to his peace plan, but Hamas only agreed to the first stage of it, which involved returning the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza to Israel under a permanent ceasefire and resumption of humanitarian aid that Israel has still not complied with.
Hamas always said clearly that it has no authority to negotiate over other parts of Trump’s plan, since they involve the future government of all of Palestine and require the input of many different groups in Gaza and the other occupied territories. Hamas said it would only disarm once a Palestinian state is fully established, at which time it will hand over its weapons to the new armed forces of the state of Palestine.
In October, a number of countries told US officials that they would consider sending their troops to participate in the proposed International Stabilization Force in Gaza. They included Egypt, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Malaysia, and Pakistan, as well as Australia, Canada, and Cyprus.
On the other hand, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have all rejected sending troops to join the ISF. Azerbaijan has said it could only send troops once all fighting has ended, and Egypt has flip-flopped on taking part. As it became clear that Trump and his “peace board” might order the ISF to use force to disarm Hamas fighters, the UAE said its forces would not take part either.
In fact, not a single country has so far committed to join the force, while Israel has said it would not allow Turkish forces to enter Gaza, and claims the right to approve or refuse any country’s participation. Israel has also been escalating its ceasefire violations since the Security Council resolution was passed, a sure way to deter countries from joining the ISF.
Hamas and the resistance groups are not alone in rejecting Trump’s plan. Al Jazeera asked people in Gaza City for comments, and they were just as critical. “I completely reject this decision,” said Moamen Abdul-Malek. “Our people… are able to rule ourselves. We don’t need forces from Arab or foreign countries to rule us. We are the people of this country, and we will bear responsibility for it.”
Another man in Gaza City told Al Jazeera that the plan violates the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. “It would strip the resistance of its weapons,” said Mohammed Hamdan, “despite the fact that resistance is a legitimate right of peoples under occupation.”
And Sanaa Mahmoud Kaheel said she doesn’t trust Trump, who previously threatened to ethnically cleanse Gaza and steal its land to build a US-Israeli beach resort. “Things will be unclear with the international forces, and we do not know what might happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow with them being in Gaza,” she said. “This could help Trump tighten his grip on Gaza and work towards establishing a ‘riviera’ there, as he himself said before. Nothing is guaranteed.”
Are they really ready to sacrifice their own young people’s blood to mix with the blood of innocent Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza?
The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), based in Al-Bireh in the West Bank, rejects the false choice that the United States has presented to the world: “Either accept their plan with all its flaws and non-guarantees, or accept going back to a live-streamed genocide.”
Instead, PIPD and the global Palestinian solidarity movement are working to end the Israeli occupation and the impunity that sustains it, and to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation and crimes against humanity. On its Global Accountability Map, PIPD charts the progress of “concrete and approved actions by governments, local authorities, civil society, the private sector, courts, and academia to hold Israeli colonial entities and interests accountable.”
More and more of the world is supporting the Palestinian struggle and the movement to hold Israel accountable for its decades of illegal occupation and ever-escalating international crimes. While the US uses its veto to corrupt the UN Security Council, people and governments have come together to hold Israel accountable in the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Instead of passively accepting subservience to the Security Council, the General Assembly asked the ICJ to rule on the legality of the Israeli occupation and its legal consequences, and the ICJ ruled in 2024 that the occupation is illegal and must therefore be ended as quickly as possible.
Instead of making further demands on the occupation’s long-suffering victims, as the US-controlled Security Council does in its Trump plan resolution, the ICJ and the General Assembly have flipped the US script to make demands on the perpetrator, Israel, including the demand, in September 2024, that Israel must end the occupation within a year.
The ICJ issued a new ruling on October 22, 2025 that Israel must allow all humanitarian aid into Gaza and allow UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) to reenter Gaza and do its work there without obstruction.
The UN General Assembly can and should respond to Israel’s failure to comply with any of these rulings and resolutions by meeting in an Emergency Special Session to organize a UN-backed arms embargo, trade boycott, and other steps to enforce them, until Israel ends its illegal occupation and starts complying with international law and UN resolutions.
More and more countries are cutting trade and military ties with Israel, and 157 countries now recognize Palestine as an independent nation with the same rights as others. People in many countries are rising up to protest Israel’s genocide and occupation, and to boycott Israeli products and companies that are complicit in its crimes.
The Israeli and US governments are feeling the pinch. If the world was passively accepting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump would not have felt compelled to conjure up his fake peace plan. It is a victory for people of conscience everywhere that he felt he had to try to change the narrative. So this is not the time to give up on the real solutions to this crisis: justice and freedom for Palestine, and accountability for Israel.
We shall see in the coming days whether the corrupt governments that hope to profit from the genocide in Gaza will send their own troops to fight the Palestinian Resistance and perpetuate the Israeli occupation. Are they really ready to sacrifice their own young people’s blood to mix with the blood of innocent Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza?
We hope that they will instead make common cause with the people of Gaza and insist that Israel must comply with the demands of the ICJ and the UN General Assembly and immediately end its obscene, decades-long, illegal occupation of Palestine.
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Beyond the Yellow Line: Israel's New Gaza Kill Zone
In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves.
Nov 21, 2025
The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing campaign of destruction.
Starting on October 10, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.
As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent "Gaza envelope" region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilization remained standing following the Israeli genocide. Between October 10 and November 2, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilizing its specialized military engineering units.
The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.
Gaza's new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible.
If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.
Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly targeting Rafah and Khan Younis in the south. Later, and with greater intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of the so-called ceasefire.
In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of Israel's military calculations, which consistently operate outside the periphery of international law.
Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, the demarcation of Gaza's borders was not driven by military calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world's most ancient civilizations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger geographical socioeconomic space.
Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem—the Jerusalem Independent District.
But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district reached Al-Majdal (today's Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.
Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3% of the overall size of historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this tiny strip of land for over 77 years.
When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of the strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians further, sectionalizing Gaza into several regions. The size and location of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and to create military "buffer zones" around Israeli military encampments and illegal settlements.
Between 1967 and Israel's so-called "disengagement" from Gaza, Israel had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and checkpoints, effectively bisecting the strip and confiscating nearly 40% of its land mass.
Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within Gaza, a heavily fortified "buffer zone" snaking across the northern and eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared to approach what was often referred to as the "kill zone."
Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.
Gaza's new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only trickles of lifesaving aid.
For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable culmination of their protracted, multigenerational dispossession.
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