Israel Is Quietly Expanding Its Occupation of Gaza Under Cover of “Ceasefire”

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I keep asking myself: How can the world believe Israel’s claim that a “ceasefire” is still in place?

The occupation has convinced the world that the bloodshed in Gaza has stopped, while in reality families are still being erased from the civil registry in absolute silence. The world is quiet — perhaps simply because something called a “ceasefire” was announced?

What the world does not see is that, day after day, the Israeli military expands its control inside Gaza. It advances slowly, swallowing a street, a neighborhood, an entire area — quietly redrawing the map while the world celebrates a fabricated calm. The war has not stopped; it has only changed form: from bombing to quiet expansion, from airstrikes to a creeping occupation.

The world also fails to see how Gaza is being flooded with a deceptive illusion of normalcy: sweets, chocolates, and new electronics are allowed in, as if people here crave luxury — while the essentials like meat, eggs, and medicine continue to be blocked.

Imagine that the simplest necessities of life have become rare treasures, and when they do appear, they are sold at outrageous prices. Traders raise prices on essentials like medicines and meat to unbearable levels because the supply is so scarce.

How can the occupation deceive the world so easily? And how can the world swallow this lie while the occupation expands before everyone’s eyes?

The night of November 19, 2025, was one of the hardest nights I have ever lived through. I woke in terror as the explosions shook the ground beneath my body, certain for a moment that the war had returned and the ceasefire had collapsed entirely.

The scene felt identical to the night the second truce ended on March 18, 2025 — those same violent blasts ripping us from our sleep and planting questions in our minds: What is happening? Has the war begun again?

We stepped outside to see what was happening and asked our neighbor, Marwan Al-Namra. He told us, “This isn’t a new war … just a few hours under fire, and then Israel will announce — like always — the return of the ceasefire.”

Although our neighborhood of Al-Rimal itself wasn’t bombed that night, the strikes that hit Al-Zaytoun (two kilometers away) and Al-Shujaiya (five kilometers away) were so close and so powerful that they felt as if they were exploding right behind me. The walls shook violently with every blast.

At the same time, airstrikes were pounding Khan Younis in the south without pause. The sounds rolled from north to south, as if all of Gaza were being struck at once — as if the occupation wanted to remind us that the “ceasefire” that the world speaks of is nothing but a thin veil pulled over a fire that never stops burning.

At dawn, the scale of the tragedy emerged: 28 Palestinians were killed in Al-Zaytoun, Al-Shujaiya, and Khan Younis — 17 children and a woman among them — and more than 77 others were injured in strikes on densely populated neighborhoods, despite Israeli claims that they were targeting resistance leaders.

On November 20, rescuers recovered the body of a one-and-a-half-year-old girl from the Kashko family who was killed when Israel bombed her house in Al-Zaytoun. A young man named Sameh Rajab was also declared dead after an airstrike hit a building sheltering displaced families in the same neighborhood — joining his wife and children, who were killed during the 2023 genocide.

That neighborhood has endured wave after wave of death and destruction. I remember the suffering of my friend and fellow Truthout contributor Shahad Ali, who was displaced from there and lost her mother, her home, and everything she owned.

The Israeli occupation’s repeated actions to expand the Yellow Zone often directly affect residential neighborhoods, forcing civilians to flee.

The Civil Defense spokesperson, Mahmoud Basal, confirmed that five civilians — including a woman and a child — were killed when an Israeli strike hit the Ministry of Endowments building near the Asqoula junction in Al-Zaytoun. Nasser Medical Complex also confirmed seven deaths after Israeli strikes hit the Al-Mawasi camps in Khan Younis.

By noon on November 20, the sound of the bombardment had grown even harsher. It wasn’t close, but it was violently loud — loud enough to make my heart race. I called my father, who was in the market with my uncle, to ask what was happening, especially since the entire day had already felt unbearably heavy. He told me that people in the market were saying there were intense strikes near the Yellow Line — a series of yellow markers placed on the ground that marks the boundary between the parts of Gaza controlled by the Israeli military (the “Yellow Zone”) and the areas that are still civilian territory.

Rumors about strikes near the Yellow Line were spreading among passersby that day, but no one in Gaza knew yet that the Israeli army was actually shifting the boundary to expand the Yellow Zone — not until panic broke out in Al-Rimal market as fear rippled through the crowd.

The Israeli occupation’s repeated actions to expand the Yellow Zone often directly affect residential neighborhoods, forcing civilians to flee or restricting their access to areas that were once theirs.

The anxiety escalated when families began fleeing Al-Shujaiya after Israeli vehicles advanced and artillery shelling intensified toward the western parts of the neighborhood, east of Gaza City. We heard the story of Haj Abu Muhammad Mushtaha, who was forced to flee with 20 members of his family as the fire grew too heavy to endure. When he tried to return home that evening, he was shocked to find that the occupation had placed concrete blocks more than 500 meters west of the Yellow Line — the same line established in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement between the Palestinian resistance and Israel on October 10. It was an additional expansion of the army’s presence across the ruined neighborhood, blocking him entirely from reaching his home.

And he was not the only one. Dozens of families in Al-Shujaiya have been unable to return to their homes — not before the ceasefire, not after the Yellow Line was drawn, and not now after Israel has expanded it even further. A friend of ours from the Farwana family had been displaced since the earliest days of the war, and to this day he has not only been unable to return, he has been unable even to see his destroyed home.

The Israeli army shifted the locations of the yellow markers, extending the zone it controls in eastern Gaza City.

So, the question stands: What is the occupation trying to achieve by expanding its borders under the guise of a “ceasefire”?

What breaks me most is that no one in this world seems to care.

My father rushed back home, sensing that the situation was becoming dangerously unstable — especially after hearing what had happened to the Mushtaha family, a well-known family in Gaza and particularly in Al-Rimal. On his way back, he ran into a passerby named Imad Tottah, who told him that everything people were whispering about in the market was true. Just moments earlier, the news had confirmed that Israel had been bombing Al-Shujaiya and Al-Zaytoun with brutal intensity in order to expand the Yellow Line.

The picture became even clearer when the Government Media Office announced that the Israeli army had shifted the locations of the yellow markers, extending the zone it controls in eastern Gaza City by an additional 300 meters into the neighborhoods of Al-Shujaiya and Al-Tuffah.

The Israeli occupation never stops — bombardment, displacement, and full-scale extermination are still occurring, wiping entire families off the civil registry. This is what happened to the Abu Shawish family, erased at dawn on November 22, 2025, as if they were nothing more than numbers added to the ever-growing tally of the dead. What pains me most is the world’s insistence on describing this situation as a “ceasefire” while the bombing, the killing, and the destruction continue without pause.

What kind of ceasefire is this, when the fire never truly stops?

Despite the siege, the scarcity, and the constant threat around us, we hold on to our lessons, our dreams, and the hope of a life beyond the rubble.

Today, we keep moving forward, even as fear clings to us and the possibility of war returning hangs over every moment. We send my little brother Zaid to school, and my sister Farah is preparing to register at the university after the announcement that Gaza’s universities will soon resume in-person classes instead of online learning.

We are holding onto life with everything we have — even when life itself lets go of us.

Despite the siege, the scarcity, and the constant threat around us, we hold on to our lessons, our dreams, and the hope of a life beyond the rubble. We study, we rebuild, and we push forward, determined to carve out a future from beneath the ruins — simply because we refuse to break.

Posted in Progressive Political News