SHEJAIYA, Gaza Strip — In Gaza City this week, a vast landscape of gray rubble stretched as far as the eye could see against a vibrant blue sky marred by dust and dark pillars of smoke.

Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect on October 10, IDF forces have pulled back to the so-called Yellow Line. The boundary, steadily being demarcated by concrete blocks coated in yellow paint, now separates Israeli-held territory from the 47% of the Strip left in Hamas’s hands.

More than a month into the agreement, the ceasefire remains shaky, and marks only the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan in Gaza. The second phase — which includes the disarmament of Hamas — remains stalled, with no indication of when, or even whether, it will begin.

“Hamas is not disarming; they are actually rearming,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said on Wednesday morning. “It’s a big problem, and it’s something that we will not accept.”

Shoshani made the comments to Israeli and international journalists at an army post inside Gaza City’s eastern Shejaiya neighborhood, roughly 200 meters inside the Yellow Line.

The position sits in what used to be one of Hamas’s most fortified strongholds, an area that has seen repeated heavy fighting in the past two years and where dozens of IDF soldiers have been killed.

Nearly a decade before the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, sparked the two-year Gaza war, Shejaiya was already a bloody battleground. In 2014, two days after Israel launched the ground offensive known as Operation Protective Edge to find and demolish Hamas’s cross-border attack tunnels and thwart rocket fire, seven soldiers were killed fighting in the neighborhood — including Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, whose body was abducted by Hamas and retrieved by the IDF this year.

Standing on the outer edge of the post, the skyline of Gaza City — much of which narrowly escaped devastation when the IDF’s planned

© The Times of Israel