The death toll in Gaza since the nominal ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has surpassed 1,000, according to reporting from Al Jazeera, raising urgent questions about what the agreement actually achieved and what obligations it actually created. The milestone — coming weeks after the deal was announced to considerable international fanfare — has been met with expressions of shock from Palestinian residents, who describe returning to neighbourhoods only to find devastation that continues to accumulate. Separately, the Guardian has published an exclusive investigation documenting how Israeli forces have levelled at least 46 villages across a 608 square kilometre occupied zone inside southern Lebanon — demolitions conducted mostly after the April 17 Lebanon-Israel ceasefire that was itself supposed to end hostilities. The convergence of these two stories paints a picture of ceasefires as political instruments rather than enforceable constraints on military conduct.
The received wisdom
The mainstream international community framing treats the Gaza ceasefire as a fragile but real achievement — a diplomatic intervention that interrupted what was otherwise heading toward full-scale regional war. The International Court of Justice’s preliminary rulings, the sustained international pressure on Israel’s government, and the eventual agreement are cited as evidence that the rules-based international order, however imperfect, retains some capacity to constrain even determined military actors. The deaths since the ceasefire are acknowledged as a tragedy, but they are contextualised within a residual military logic: clearing tunnels, eliminating holdout fighters, responding to continued rocket fire. In this framing, the relevant comparison is to the much higher death tolls of the active war phase, and the ceasefire, however imperfect, represents a measurable de-escalation. The Guardian’s Lebanon investigation is treated as an important accountability piece, but its political implications — what it says about whether the ceasefire has any legal or practical force — are somewhat muted in the mainstream discussion.
A different read
A ceasefire that permits the killing of 1,000 people and the demolition of 46 villages is not a ceasefire in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a political label applied to a continued military operation, and the international community’s willingness to treat it as something more is a form of complicity that deserves a sharper name than “concern.”
Begin with the historical parallel. After the Korean Armistice of 1953, the demilitarised zone was drawn and largely respected — imperfectly, with incidents, but the fundamental fact of cessation held. After the 1973 Yom Kippur ceasefire, fighting continued for several days before the lines stabilised. What we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon is something different: a situation in which the word “ceasefire” has been detached from any military reality and exists primarily as a diplomatic fiction that allows governments to avoid the harder choices that a genuine enforcement mechanism would require. Al Jazeera’s reporting on the 1,000-death milestone is not a story about the tragedy of residual conflict; it is a story about the systematic hollowing-out of international humanitarian law.
The Lebanon village demolitions reported by the Guardian are particularly striking. The Guardian geolocated images of six multinational construction equipment companies — Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi, and Komatsu — whose bulldozers and excavators were being used by Israeli forces to demolish South Lebanese villages. The demolitions occurred mostly after the April 17 ceasefire. This is not collateral damage in the fog of war. It is deliberate, systematic, postwar destruction of civilian infrastructure using identifiable equipment from identifiable companies. The Nuremberg principles, the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on destruction of civilian property, the customary international humanitarian law rules codified in the 1977 Additional Protocols — all of these apply. The companies involved have, predictably, said they are investigating. The more important question is whether any international legal body has the authority and the will to act.
Here the right-of-centre analyst parts company with the reflexive anti-Israel left, but also with the reflexive pro-Israel right. This is not a question of which side one sympathises with in the broader conflict. It is a question of whether international law means anything, or whether it is, as the cynics always suspected, a set of rules that apply to the weak and not to the strong. A conservative who takes rule of law seriously — who believes that laws must mean something or they mean nothing — cannot look at the post-ceasefire death toll and the village demolitions and conclude that the system is working. The rules-based international order that Western governments endlessly invoke is being tested, and it is failing.
The political consequences of this failure extend well beyond the immediate conflict. Every government in the Global South that watches a ceasefire be violated with impunity draws its own conclusions about whether Western-led international institutions offer it any protection. China draws conclusions about Taiwan. Russia draws conclusions about Ukraine. The erosion of international humanitarian law is not a regional story; it is a story about the foundations of the post-1945 order.
What to watch
Watch whether any of the six equipment companies named in the Guardian’s investigation face legal action in their home jurisdictions — Belgium has been active in prosecuting complicit firms under universal jurisdiction principles, and a precedent here could reshape corporate exposure to conflict zone liability. Watch the ICJ’s timeline on its genocide preliminary ruling, which now carries more political weight given the post-ceasefire death toll. Watch whether the US-Iran deal’s implicit redirection of American diplomatic attention away from Israel changes the Netanyahu government’s calculus on the pace and scale of operations in Lebanon. And watch Gaza’s public health infrastructure — UN agencies have warned repeatedly that disease, not bullets, kills the most in post-conflict environments, and the number 1,000 may look modest against what follows.
— J