Three years on: Gaza's displaced struggle in 'neither war nor peace'

Ahmed Ishtaiwi owns six plastic chairs. They are worn and cheap, but in the tent where he now lives with his two daughters near Deir al-Balah, they are among his most valuable things. The chairs sit empty most days. His real home—the one with a garden where he used to have breakfast and tea—is in Beit Lahiya, a town to the north that no longer exists in any form he would recognize. He cannot go back. The house is rubble, and the roads that led there are closed to him.

Three years have passed since October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, most of them civilians. The Israeli military response that followed has reshaped the entire territory of Gaza. In the years since, 73,000 Palestinians have been killed—the vast majority civilians—and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Two point three million people now live in a place that is neither fully at war nor at peace, a condition that has become the defining feature of existence itself.

Layan al-Jbour is fifteen years old. She lives with her parents and siblings in a makeshift shelter in al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastline at Gaza's southern edge. When she arranges the bedding in their tent, she is trying to recreate the order of her former bedroom. She brought almost nothing when she fled—only her schoolbag, which she has kept close because it is the last tangible link to the life she had before, to school and friends and a world that operated according to rules she understood. The schoolbag is now her most precious possession.

A ceasefire took effect a year ago, but the fighting has not truly stopped. Israeli airstrikes continue. Palestinians who venture near the yellow line that marks the boundary between Israeli-controlled territory and areas held by Hamas have been shot dead. In the past twelve months alone, the death toll has risen by another 1,400 people. Last week, at least two Palestinians were killed in airstrikes in Beit Lahiya and Khan Younis. An international aid worker who spent much of the conflict in Gaza, now based in Amman, described the situation plainly: "This is what we feared—a ceasefire that just isn't a ceasefire." Daily life has become a catalog of deprivation. People are no longer starving in the acute sense, but they are malnourished. Water is scarce. Healthcare is minimal. Disease spreads through overcrowded camps where sanitation is inadequate. Unemployment is near total. The economy has collapsed.

Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told the Security Council last month that infectious diseases are now widespread in the displacement sites, spreading through the camps where hundreds of thousands live in tents. He cited critical shortages of medical supplies and fuel, and noted that Israel has restricted the entry of certain humanitarian items, slowing preparations for the approaching winter. Israeli authorities dispute this characterization, saying that more than 600 trucks of supplies enter Gaza each day and that adequate provisions are reaching the population.

Saleh Kilani is seventy years old. Before the war, he owned a farm in Beit Lahiya with olive trees. Around this time of year, he used to press about sixty containers of olive oil. He has lost all of it. He cannot return to his home or his farm without risking his life. "This is not a life," he said. "We are exhausted and we have lost hope." He remembers when orange and peach trees, green fields, grapes and figs were simply part of the landscape, things no one thought twice about. Now, when he sees them, he is startled by their existence.

Esraa Abu Taiba is twenty-six. She lived in Bani Suheila, a town east of Khan Younis that is now within the Israeli-controlled zone. Of her five brothers, two were killed in the conflict, two were wounded, and one is among the more than 1,500 Palestinians from Gaza held in detention in Israel. She lived in a house with a washing machine, running water, and a garden. Now she lives in a tent. Her family was displaced multiple times during the fighting and lost everything except a house key, which her mother keeps. The only part of her old life that Abu Taiba can still practice is her work as a beautician. She cuts hair and does makeup for girls in the surrounding tents, especially for weddings. "It takes me back to a beautiful and happy period," she said, "even if only for a little while."

Hamas has reasserted control over the two-thirds of Gaza not under direct Israeli military occupation, establishing a rudimentary administration that provides patchy education, some healthcare, and policing based largely on arbitrary punishment. Donald Trump's plan to end the conflict has stalled. There has been little progress toward disarming Hamas, withdrawing Israeli troops, or beginning the vast work of reconstruction. Kilani summed up the condition that now defines life for millions: "We are living through a period that can be described as neither war nor peace."