Gaza: A Ceasefire That Exists Only on Paper

For Belgrade, which has spent years carefully balancing its traditionally close ties with the Palestinian side against ever tighter security and economic cooperation with Israel, the situation in Gaza is not a distant matter but a test of how much signed agreements are worth when no one honors them on the ground. Nine months after a truce was announced under the mediation of major powers, residents of the Gaza Strip say the document exists only on paper.

According to figures cited by humanitarian sources and health authorities in the enclave, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed since the agreement was signed in October, and nearly 4,000 people have been wounded. Most of the victims, the same sources say, are women and children. This, then, is a ceasefire that has halted large military operations but not the daily dying.

Why do Gaza’s residents say the ceasefire does not exist?

The answer lies in what is happening along the so-called demarcation line. According to residents, Israeli forces have advanced beyond the agreed lines, in places several hundred meters deeper into populated areas. In some neighborhoods, such as Zeitoun, the shifting front has rendered previously inhabited parts of the city inaccessible, so families who returned home after the truce are on the move again. For people displaced for the third or fourth time, the difference between war and peace has been reduced to a formality.

Strikes on homes, on civilians and on displaced families living in tents continue, residents say, almost every day. On top of that, restrictions on the delivery of food and humanitarian aid persist at the crossings, which means that even those who survived the shelling are not guaranteed the bare minimum to live on. The combination of intermittent strikes and chronic shortages has produced a situation in which, as people in the enclave put it, nothing has fundamentally changed.

That is precisely why a social media campaign called They Lied to You has been launched. Its aim is to challenge the impression, widespread in international opinion, that the war is over and that life in Gaza has returned to normal. The activists’ message is simple: the end of large-scale fighting is not the same as peace, and the absence of headlines in the world’s media does not mean the absence of victims.

What does a ceasefire on paper mean for the bigger picture?

Gaza illustrates a broader problem of modern diplomacy: a truce with no clear mechanism for monitoring and no penalty for violations turns into a political form without substance. When one side can move the demarcation line without consequence, the other side rightly argues that there is effectively no ceasefire at all. For observers in Brussels and other European capitals, it is an uncomfortable reminder that a signature on a document is worth only as much as the will behind it to enforce it.

For a Serbian audience there is an added lesson. The region we live in knows all too well the agreements that are celebrated while the ink is still drying, only to quietly erode on the ground afterward. Gaza, in that sense, is an extreme example of what happens when the international community declares a problem solved and then looks away. The question that remains open is not only how many more people will die under a truce that is no truce, but also how much the word of the great powers is worth when the guarantees they give come with no tool to uphold them.

Does a ceasefire with no monitoring mechanism even deserve to be called a ceasefire?