Two years after 7 October: Gaza’s resistance endures, but leaders still look away

• 1 Comment

October 7, 2025 at 8:00 am

Smokes rise from residential areas following Israeli military attacks on several areas south of Gaza City, Gaza on October 06, 2025. [Mohammed Nassar – Anadolu Agency]

• 

  by Jenny Williams

   @Jenny9Williams

Two years after 7 October, 2023, Gaza remains the region’s rawest wound and the clearest test of whether international law still restrains power when civilians stand in the line of fire. The front is no longer confined to a small coastal strip. It runs through ports and parliaments, courtrooms and campuses, and the United Nations itself, where the gap between lofty declarations and action has left families to bargain with hunger, cold and fear.

Ceasefire diplomacy resumes in Egypt. The agenda is familiar: an end to bombardment, exchanges of hostages and prisoners, phased withdrawals and real access for aid. Negotiators say they sense momentum. Parents in Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah will believe it when water runs from taps again, when bakeries reopen, when a child can sleep indoors without counting the seconds between strikes. Hostage families in Israel keep vigil with lists taped to fridges and phones never on silent. Every round of talks begins and ends with people who need certainty, not slogans.

Inside Gaza, the language of “risk of famine” has given way to the bleak clarity of famine confirmed. Humanitarian agencies set out the arithmetic: without safe, sustained access, calories do not reach mouths, and clinics cannot stabilise children whose bodies have turned to saving only what they must. Nurses keep malnutrition charts by hand because the power fails; mothers split bread into careful thirds. A short “pause” cannot offset the physics of starvation.

The war has a calendar as well as a map. Over these twenty four months, temporary arrangements collapsed because ends never converged. Israel sought maximalist military goals without a credible path to a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Hamas conditioned long-term calm and releases on steps Israel rejects. Mediators split proposals into phases that made each stage a new cliff-edge, and violations went unpunished. When leaders know that consequences are unlikely, restraint becomes optional.

Trump’s Gaza Plan: Does it signal a shift in policy?

Beyond the battlefield, a different story has unfolded. The world did not fall silent; people refused to. From Rome and London to Barcelona and Lisbon, the streets filled week after week with families, trade unionists and students who carried photos of loved ones in Rafah and lists of medicines to send if crossings reopened. At sea and on desert roads, the Global Sumud convoys and flotillas tried to break a blockade that many governments normalised. One can debate the wisdom of tactics at sea, but not the message: ordinary people attempted what institutions would not. That is what sumud—steadfastness—looks like in 2025.

Inside the UN, meanwhile, the dissonance has grown louder. Member states expanded Palestine’s participation and backed a pathway to statehood by overwhelming majorities in the General Assembly. Yet the Security Council still failed to protect civilians. Even the farcical spectacle of microphones cutting out as leaders defended Palestinian rights fed a sense that the system cannot keep its most basic promise. When cameras return to the rubble, no one in a queue for bread asks what the vote tally was in New York. They ask whether aid will move today.

Washington’s record sits uneasily with its language. Since late 2023, the United States has advanced large aid packages and weapons transfers to Israel even as humanitarian alarms flashed red. America has the leverage to make law meaningful; it has too rarely used it. Conditionality is not abandonment. It is the difference between supporting a partner and subsidising impunity.

Human stories cut through abstractions. A teacher in Deir Al-Balah says her pupils measure time by how many times they have moved. A nurse near Al-Shifa keeps a handwritten list of blood types taped inside a metal cabinet because the system has been offline for months. A father refreshes a names-and-numbers chat at dawn to see who answered in the night. Their lives do not cancel the agony of Israeli families who have endured murder, abduction and the long uncertainty of captivity. Grief is not a zero-sum ledger; the law does not recognise favoured victims.

So what would it take to end a war that devours every “pause”? A rights-first plan starts by naming ends, not just means, and by aligning public courage with official policy.

First, one united Arab–Islamic position with a single text and clock. The Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation should lock a joint stance that ties a Gaza ceasefire to a time-bound pathway towards restoration of Palestinian rights under international law, including statehood and the Right of Return, with Jerusalem as the capital. Fragmentation has allowed parties to play capitals off against each other. One document, one calendar, one set of consequences for slippage.

Second, targeted economic pressure that maps onto law. States should sanction the illegal settlement enterprise and individuals credibly implicated in grave breaches, and press for a UN-mandated arms embargo on any party violating international humanitarian law. At the civic level, coordinated consumer boycotts aimed at firms complicit in the occupation increase costs without punishing ordinary Israelis or Palestinians.

Third, conditioned Western assistance. The United States and European allies should tie military aid to verified compliance with the laws of war and concrete steps that reopen political space, including protection for journalists and aid workers. Without conditions, leverage is theatre. With them, it becomes policy.

Fourth, grassroots pressure that turns marches into measures. Trade unions, universities and city councils can adopt procurement and investment rules that align with international law, build municipal humanitarian corridors and make solidarity more than a weekend ritual. Street power should travel into budgets and bylaws.

Fifth, a monitored ceasefire with civilian metrics. Verification must be independent and public from day one. Measure success in calories per person, litres of clean water and functioning hospital beds per district, not in truck counts. Aid lanes—multiple land crossings and a protected coastal route—must be insulated from political bargaining.

Sixth, sequenced releases and inclusive governance. Free civilian hostages and the most vulnerable prisoners first, with clarity on the return of remains, then move to a transitional Palestinian administration of technocrats and civil society figures, with elections when conditions allow. A settlement that pretends Hamas never existed will not hold; a settlement that leaves Palestinians without a representative centre will not either.

READ: Demilitarisation, genocide and the two-state paradigm

Language matters as much as logistics. Over these two years, a vocabulary did quiet violence: “collateral damage”, “surgical strike”, “human shields”. Each phrase turned people with names, homes and hopes into problems to be managed. Rights-based journalism must resist this erasure. It should hold at once the anguish of Israeli hostage families and the mass suffering of Palestinians whose daily terror remains less visible to global audiences. If officials listened longer to the ordinary grammar of life in Gaza—the lists of medicines mothers recite, the debate about whether to queue for bread or fetch water, the heavy quiet after a strike—policy would look different.

Gaza cannot be managed into quiet. It must be repaired, and its people must be restored to the centre of any settlement. A ceasefire worthy of the name will not trade their rights for someone else’s reassurance. It will insist that equality is not a post-war luxury but the condition of peace—for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Two years after 7 October, Gaza’s resistance endures; it is leaders who still look away. The streets have not.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251007-two-years-after-7-october-gazas-resistance-endures-but-leaders-still-look-away/