Mideast: What Has Actually Changed For Palestinians After The Ceasefire?

Nearly 1 year into the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the coverage of Gaza and the West Bank in western news has plummeted, while the human suffering in both of these areas has continued and, in some aspects, worsened. 

Despite the truce agreement’s framework mandating a cessation of hostilities, the entry of specific daily quotas of aid, and the return of displaced people to their homes, among other stipulations, progress on and commitment to these terms have largely ground to a halt in the face of renewed disagreements between Hamas and the Israeli government. As a result, Palestinians in Gaza continue to face a severe humanitarian crisis that includes limited access to food, clean water, adequate shelter, education, employment, and medical treatment. 

The West Bank, which was not included under the largely defunct truce agreement, has witnessed a marked escalation of violence and military action since October 2025, as well as its own growing humanitarian crisis. Like Gaza, housing destruction in the West Bank leaves many without shelter, aid continues to be cut to the detriment of food security, and the number of civilian casualties continues to grow. 

Palestinians, regardless of which part of their territory they call home, continue to experience restrictions on their movement, freedoms, and opportunities in education and employment, as well as limited access to basic necessities such as clean water. 

As such, it begs the question: what has actually changed for Palestinians after the ceasefire? 

On the topic of food security, the Gaza Strip has been pulled back from the brink of mass famine since the implementation of ceasefire, while the proportion of Palestinians in Gaza facing acute food insecurity has dropped from 77% of the population or 1.6 million people at the end of 2025 to 67% of the population, roughly 1.4 million people, as of July 2026. Significant gains have adjacently been made in nutrition assistance, with an exceptional increase from less than 1% of children under 5 being provided nutrition support rising to 60%. 

Despite these gains, however, food insecurity in Gaza remains a widespread issue, with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification projecting worsening malnutrition throughout Gaza through the end of 2026. Dwindling funding and resources available to the humanitarian organizations that provide food aid are contributing to a growing fear that these steps forward might only be temporary relief.

In their news release from July 23rd, the Acting Executive Director of the World Food Program stressed that the “progress on food security in Gaza… is fragile and can easily be reversed.”

In the same news release, the Executive Director of UNICEF also stated, “Without sustained access and funding, these gains could be lost within months."

While Gaza has seen fragile progress, however, the West Bank has experienced a significant downturn in food security, with the World Food Program estimating nearly 900,000 West Bank residents to currently be food insecure — nearly double what the figure was two years ago. An estimated one third of West Bank Palestinians are now unable to afford nutritious food, with the food security issue primed to grow as the WFP was forced to halve its dispersion of food in the West Bank following September 1st to only 200,000 of the former 400,000 recipients due to funding shortfalls.  

Further complicating food and nutritional security for Palestinians are limited access to agricultural resources, including farmland, equipment and livestock. When farming makes up as much as 8% of its GDP and over 60,000 jobs across Palestinian territory, this means not only a loss of local food production, but also a loss of livelihoods. 

Israeli blockades, checkpoints, and enforced boundaries have left some farmers completely cut off from or significantly hindered in reaching their fields and workplaces; as of December 2025, there were 925 documented movement barriers in the West Bank, with at least 20% of these barriers restricting access to agricultural land. It is estimated that between the end of 2025 and mid-2026, more than 20% of agricultural activities in Palestine have declined as a result of Israeli restrictions and barriers. Further constraining Palestinian agricultural means is the division of the control of land within the West Bank, as the vast majority of land suitable for agriculture falls firmly under exclusive Israeli control, making it overwhelmingly inaccessible to Palestinians. 

Palestinians also continue to face an extreme lack of accessibility to clean water, sanitary services, and electricity. Throughout 2026, basic utility infrastructure has continued to decline on the whole. 91% of Gazan households now face moderate to high levels of water insecurity, up from 84% in June. With destroyed and deteriorating water and desalination infrastructure, 74% of Gazan households now rely on water trucks for survival, with the price per cubic meter of water more than doubling from roughly 100 shekels in late 2025 to more than 200 as of June. 

Water scarcity and difficulty accessing consistent, clean water is also an ongoing issue for the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Coinciding with increasing rates of settler violence and expansion into West Bank Palestinian communities, approximately 160 water and sanitation structures have been damaged, destroyed or seized by settlers in 2026 alone, greatly limiting the existing water infrastructure that can be used by Palestinians in these areas. For the approximately 300,000 Palestinians in the West Bank who live in marginalized or rural communities, they are almost entirely disconnected from the water network; for these communities, their levels of water consumption are on par with levels in disaster zones: a mere 26 liters per person per day. In comparison, Israelis living in the West Bank have historically received and consumed 10 times the amount of water as Palestinians despite their population being only 3 times larger.

Energy and electricity crises compound already complicated desalination and water treatment issues. The energy and electricity systems in Gaza have reached a near-total collapse; 85% of electrical networks and power assets were damaged or left completely inoperable since October of 2023, gutting preexisting infrastructure. The function of the Gaza Power Plant has also been decimated, being left completely inoperable for nearly six months now following the use of the last of its fuel reserves in April. In the West Bank, military operations and settler attacks that have purposefully targeted energy infrastructure have left many Palestinians dealing with extensive waits for repairs, inconsistent electricity, rolling blackouts, or complete blackouts that can last days. 

Without consistent access to fuel, wastewater pumping stations have also been forced to cease operations in parts of the Palestinian territories, leaving an ever-growing garbage and wastewater crisis in its wake. As it currently stands, over 710,000 tons of household waste have accumulated alongside nearly 60 million tons of war rubble in Gaza; with no means to properly treat and dispose of it, 52 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of untreated wastewater are being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea daily. As temporary dumping sites reach capacity and Israel blocks access to landfills, waste-management problems continue to worsen and pose significant health risks as a result.  

The healthcare system in Gaza also remains at a drastically reduced level of functionality with devastated infrastructure and a crippling lack of access to medical supplies. Without proper means or resources to treat dire medical issues, roughly 13,237 patients have had to be evacuated from Gaza for treatment since October 2023, and roughly 5,440 patients have had to be evacuated since October 2025. Around 18,000 are still waiting for evacuation as bureaucratic and physical barriers block their path and the medical care situation continues to devolve. Access to medical supplies, for instance, has continued to worsen, with over half of essential medicines in Gaza going completely out of stock as of April. 

In the West Bank, with Israel refusing to provide the Palestinian Authority its due tax revenue, the medical system has neared collapse. Nearly 40% of its primary healthcare centers have been forced to stop operation and 447 of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s 590 service branches have had to cut back to being open only one or two days a week due to a lack of financial means. 

Complications and barriers to medical treatment are only compounded by the continuing violence and targeted attacks against Palestinians by Israeli forces, with at least 1,390 Palestinians killed and 4,801 injured in Gaza since the ceasefire’s implementation in October 2025. Since the start of 2026 alone, at least 82 Palestinians have been killed and approximately 1,900 others have been injured by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank. The need for advanced, ongoing medical treatment is massive and vastly unfulfilled as a result of an increasing scarcity of resources, with roughly 42,000 individuals left with “life-changing” injuries. 

As such, the question of what has changed for Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since the implementation of the 2025 ceasefire reveals that the trend of human suffering and prolonged humanitarian crises has seen relatively little permanent improvement and, in some aspects, has worsened.