Israel strikes Gaza despite truce: family of three killed

Nine months after a ceasefire that international mediators presented as the end of the war took effect in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on Wednesday, killing a man, his wife and their six-year-old daughter. For readers in Serbia this is not a distant chronicle of somebody else’s war: it is a test of what an armistice guaranteed by great powers is actually worth, a question this part of Europe knows from its own experience with agreements signed under foreign signatures.

Local health authorities said on Wednesday that Israeli airstrikes had killed around twelve people over the previous two days. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 1,123 people have been killed in the enclave since the ceasefire came into force. On the Israeli side, five soldiers have died in the same period. Those two figures sit side by side as the most precise description of what diplomatic statements still call a truce.

Israel has stepped up its strikes in recent days and attacked police structures in Gaza, putting under fire the only apparatus that retained any form of day-to-day control of the street in the enclave. Targeting the police is not a technical detail: it goes straight to the question of who will govern the territory, and under whose authority, once the negotiations eventually conclude.

Why has the second phase of the Trump plan stalled?

Hamas leaders concluded a fresh round of negotiations in Cairo on Tuesday, mediated by Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, on implementing the second phase of the Trump peace plan. The round ended without movement, and the reason is structural rather than procedural.

Hamas maintains that Israel has not met its obligations from the first phase and that Israeli troops still control more than 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip. Israel, for its part, says any further withdrawal depends on Hamas disarming and handing over control of the territory. Each side is therefore demanding that the other first surrender what it regards as its only remaining card, which is the textbook definition of deadlock, and no mediating channel can dissolve it through goodwill alone.

What makes this geopolitical reality harder still is that the three mediators, Cairo, Ankara and Doha, hold different levers over Hamas and virtually none over Israeli military planning. Multilateralism in this format works as a letterbox rather than as a mechanism of compulsion, which is why every round closes with a statement about talks continuing.

Lebanon as the only positive signal

The only news pointing the other way arrived on Wednesday from a different address. Talks between the United States, Israel and Lebanon on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from pilot zones in southern Lebanon ended positively after two days of negotiations.

The contrast is instructive. Where there is a state interlocutor with recognised authority and a narrow, technically defined subject, the diplomatic channel delivers a result in two days. Where the negotiation concerns disarming a non-state actor and deciding who administers a devastated territory, the same mediators fail to move a comma for months.

For Serbia and the region, which spent decades being told that international guarantees are something more durable than the current balance of forces, Deir al-Balah is an uncomfortable reminder. A ceasefire without an enforcement mechanism is not a state of peace but a pause whose length is set by the stronger side. On Wednesday, a building in central Gaza showed just how thin that pause can be.

The next Cairo round has no scheduled date, and the figure of 1,123 dead keeps rising while it is being negotiated over.

What is a ceasefire worth if nobody enforces it, and have you ever trusted the guarantees of great powers?