From Shyam Bhatia
London. For the first time in two years, the guns have fallen silent over Gaza. After months of bombardment and blockade, thousands of displaced Palestinians began walking north on Friday, pushing handcarts, bicycles, even wheelbarrows piled with children and bedding, returning to streets they no longer recognise. Israeli troops have pulled back to agreed lines, and a US-drafted ceasefire plan — astonishingly shaped by Donald Trump — has come into effect.
The ceasefire marks the first halt in fighting since March and the most serious attempt yet to end a war that has cost more than 67,000 Palestinian lives and wounded some 170,000 more, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Under the plan, Hamas will release 20 surviving Israeli hostages within 72 hours, and Israel will in turn free 250 long-term Palestinian prisoners along with about 1,700 others detained in Gaza during the conflict.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking in Jerusalem on Friday, claimed credit for the breakthrough.
“The security of Israel has guided every step of my decision-making,” he said, thanking Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and property magnate Steven Witkoff for their “unwavering friendship.” Israeli troops, he added, would maintain control over about 53 per cent of the territory until the first phase of the prisoner exchange was complete.
Yet beyond the rhetoric, the scene in Gaza was one of disbelief and exhaustion. News agency footage showed a human tide along the coastal road: families walking through dust and debris, the lucky ones riding donkey carts, a few clutching mobile phones to capture images of shattered neighbourhoods. “Thank God my house is still standing,” said 40-year-old Ismail Zayda in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan district. “But my neighbours’ houses are gone. Entire districts have vanished.”
The Israeli army announced that it would permit 600 aid trucks a day to cross into Gaza — roughly the same volume as before the war — as part of a wider humanitarian surge through all five land crossings. Food, medicine and fuel are desperately needed in areas now experiencing famine, according to UN agencies. Medical teams plan to use the lull to recover bodies trapped under rubble. Tens of thousands are still missing.
Hamas’s chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, told reporters that international guarantors had assured the group “the war is over.” But that remains far from certain. Trump’s 20-point plan, which he hopes will crown his post-presidency comeback, demands that Hamas disarm and that Gaza be run by a transitional international administration before Israel completes its withdrawal to a narrow border buffer zone. Both Hamas and Israel hold sharply differing views on who should police such an arrangement.
Trump is expected to visit Israel on Monday to address the Knesset, an appearance designed to reinforce his claim to have ended the longest and deadliest conflict in the region’s modern history.
Israel launched its campaign after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 assault that killed about 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Since then, Gaza has become a synonym for devastation, a narrow coastal strip of rubble, starvation and grief. UN investigators have accused Israel of committing genocide; Israel rejects the charge, insisting it acted in self-defence.
For someone who has reported this conflict for more than half a century, this ceasefire feels both familiar and strange. I first walked the streets of Gaza in the 1970s, when fishermen still sailed freely and the markets of Khan Younis were alive with citrus, not dust. Over the years I have seen truce follow truce, each heralded as the last war, each collapsing into the next cycle of blood.
I was there when the Camp David Accords promised peace between Israel and Egypt; when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn; when Ariel Sharon withdrew settlers from Gaza in 2005; and when optimism died in the rubble of yet another incursion. Through it all, Gaza remained trapped, a strip of land no larger than Delhi, yet carrying the weight of the world’s failures.
This latest ceasefire differs mainly in scale: the destruction is so total that both sides seem too exhausted to continue. Entire city blocks have been flattened; hospitals run on candlelight; cemeteries overflow. For Israel, the political toll has also been enormous; months of international condemnation, internal protests, and a war economy it can scarcely afford. For Palestinians, the loss is existential: tens of thousands of families erased, generations of trauma assured.
Still, hope flickers. Aid convoys began moving almost immediately after the ceasefire took effect at noon Friday. The sound of bombing that had echoed daily for 18 months was replaced by the creak of cart wheels and the rustle of returning crowds. In Khan Younis, doctors told news agencies that for the first time in months they could hear birds again. “It feels unreal,” said one. “We are afraid even of silence.”
India, long a supporter of Palestinian statehood and one of the first non-Arab countries to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation, has quietly welcomed the truce. New Delhi’s statement praised “all efforts that lead to a sustainable peace” while reiterating its support for a two-state solution. In practice, India has maintained close relations with both sides, buying arms from Israel while continuing to fund Palestinian scholarships and reconstruction. India’s balanced stance is viewed internationally as a model for middle powers seeking relevance in a polarised world.
Yet no one is under illusion that this marks a final peace. As a veteran Israeli diplomat once told me, “In our part of the world, wars end not with signatures but with fatigue.” That sentiment is palpable on both sides today. The fatigue is profound, moral, physical, political. It may be the only force strong enough to make this ceasefire hold.
When I think back to my early dispatches from Jerusalem and Beirut, I recall how every new generation of journalists arrived believing they were witnessing the last great Middle East war. Instead, the map kept redrawing itself in blood. Gaza’s latest truce may yet be broken, but it also contains the faint possibility of transformation: a chance, however slim, to rebuild a place where the next generation can live without fear of drones or rockets.
For now, the world watches as the displaced return home. Some find ruins; others find nothing. Along Gaza’s devastated seafront, children were seen collecting shell fragments, turning them into makeshift toys. “They don’t know what peace means,” a father told reporters, “but they know the difference between thunder and bombs.”
After so many years covering this region, I have learned that real peace seldom arrives with fanfare. It begins quietly, in gestures of normal life: a reopened bakery, a doctor’s call, the laughter of children where silence once ruled. Gaza’s ceasefire may not end the conflict, but it offers something the people have not had in years: a single day without war.
