A year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive. The October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, but Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, often killing civilians, including some 300 children in the past year. The deal also envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory. Jared Kushner, the U.S. president’s son-in-law and point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. And yet, nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services, or even an end to daily violence. Instead, the vast majority of its inhabitants remain packed into squalid and sprawling tent cities along a tiny—and ever-shrinking—strip of coastline, plagued by disease and rodent infestations, enduring extreme shortages of food, medicine, clean water, and access to basic sanitation.

Gazans may not be in the grip of famine as they were in prior years, but the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic—and it is not sustainable. The intolerable conditions could very well lead to a further explosion of violence. They are also enabling the endgame that many Israeli leaders want: the eventual eviction of Gaza’s over two million Palestinian residents.

Indeed, the status quo seems to suit the Israeli leadership. In a recent interview, Nikolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the high representative of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, which is overseeing the Gaza peace plan, revealed where the main obstacle to progress lies. On Israel’s commitments, Mladenov gently noted, is “where we are little bit stuck right now.” Kushner has also blamed Israel’s “crazy elections” later this month, which he says have made the Netanyahu government “a little irrational” in regard to Gaza.

Although electoral considerations are undoubtedly a factor—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is locked in a tight and, for him, existential reelection campaign—the totality of Israeli words and actions point to something deeper and more alarming: ultimately, the Netanyahu government’s strategy has less to do with stabilizing Gaza or even disarming Hamas than with rendering the territory uninhabitable and ejecting its population.

Whether or not the Trump administration shares this goal, its extraordinary deference to Netanyahu’s far-right government and general indifference to the plight of Palestinians is facilitating just such an outcome. Unless the United States and its allies and partners are prepared to force Israel to abide by its commitments, it may only be a matter of time before Gaza is lost forever.

It is hard to overstate the scale of death, destruction, and suffering inflicted on Gaza and its roughly 2.2 million inhabitants over the past three years. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Israeli military and political leaders vowed to “flatten” Gaza and turn it into a “city of tents,” promising that “Gaza will never go back to what it was.” They have delivered on those threats. The 223,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza—roughly equivalent to 15 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—have killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Israel’s assault, over which it is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, has wiped out some 92 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 95 percent of its farmland, all 12 of its universities, and nearly half of its 36 hospitals—in other words, the very institutions and infrastructure that sustain life.

After such devastation, last year’s cease-fire came as an undoubted relief. Under the first phase of Trump’s Gaza plan, the parties agreed to an immediate end to all military attacks, the exchange of hostages and prisoners, the restoration of basic services, and a massive surge in humanitarian aid. Apart from Hamas’s release of Israeli hostages, however, most of these commitments have been only partially fulfilled. Phase two, formally launched in January even though Israel had yet to meet its phase one obligations, envisioned the stabilization of Gaza through the deployment of an international force and the establishment of a Palestinian technocratic governing body, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, coupled with the gradual disarmament of Hamas and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces. Those last steps together serve as prerequisites for the long-term reconstruction of the Gaza Strip as laid out in phase three.

A full year after the cease-fire was announced, Israel continues to block the entry of Palestinian governing and policing bodies that would allow Hamas to relinquish power and reconstruction to begin. Hamas and........

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