Nearly nine months after a US-brokered ceasefire halted the war in Gaza, Israel's military now controls close to 70 percent of the territory — up from roughly half earlier in the truce — even as it continues to carry out strikes that Palestinian officials and UN monitors say violate the agreement. The expansion has turned a nominal pause in fighting into a steadily deepening occupation footprint.
The clearest sign of that came on July 14, when a series of Israeli attacks across the Strip killed at least 11 Palestinians, among them the director of the police station in the Jabalia refugee camp and several of his officers. The UN Human Rights Office said Israeli forces have been systematically targeting Gaza police — the personnel responsible for basic civic order — a pattern it warned would cripple any attempt to rebuild a functioning administration.
Gaza's Government Media Office says it has recorded 3,689 Israeli violations over the 275 days since the ceasefire took effect, resulting in 1,122 Palestinians killed and 3,599 wounded. Those figures, if accurate, describe a truce that has still averaged roughly four Palestinian deaths a day — a rate that would be a major escalation in most conflicts but that has become the quiet baseline of what both sides continue to call a ceasefire.
The humanitarian access the deal was supposed to guarantee has not materialized at anything near the promised scale. Aid monitors report that Israel is allowing only about 35 percent of the aid trucks the agreement envisions to cross into Gaza, and roughly 36 percent of the travelers cleared to move in and out. For a population the UN estimates at around two million, most of them displaced and dependent on outside supply, the shortfall is the difference between recovery and continued collapse.
The territorial picture matters because of what The Fold reported just over a week ago: on July 6, Hamas announced it was dissolving its Government Emergency Committee and handing civil administration to a technocratic body under UN and Board of Peace supervision. That committee has still not been able to physically enter Gaza. Israel's widening control of the map is one reason why — the space in which any new Palestinian administration could actually operate has been shrinking even as the diplomatic architecture around it is built.
Analysts quoted by regional outlets frame the strikes on civil officials as deliberate: killing police commanders, clerks and municipal staff prevents the emergence of any Palestinian governing structure that could outlast the war, and keeps the postwar order dependent on whatever Israel and its partners impose. Israeli officials reject that reading, casting the operations as targeting militants and describing last week's Hamas governance reshuffle as "spin that has no significance."
The contested second phase of the ceasefire — the disarmament of Hamas and the reconstruction of a territory the UN estimates is roughly 90 percent destroyed — remains frozen. Hamas has said it will not discuss its weapons until the first phase is fully completed, and the mediators have been unable to bridge that gap since the winter. Each month the deal stays stuck, the map moves in Israel's favor.
What the July 14 strikes and the 70 percent figure together suggest is that the status quo is not static. A ceasefire that is nine months old is often read as a stabilizing achievement; in Gaza it has instead become the container for a slow expansion of control and a steady civilian toll, with the institutions a future Palestinian government would need being dismantled in real time. Whether the technocratic committee ever crosses into Gaza, and on what terms, will decide if the roadmap is a transition or a holding pattern.