One year after the ceasefire, NGOs say Gaza truce holds only on paper

On the exact anniversary of the announcement of the ceasefire in Gaza, mediated by the United States on 10 October 2025, more than one hundred humanitarian organisations — including Amnesty International, Oxfam and Save the Children — signed a joint statement arguing that the truce exists only in a formal sense. According to the NGOs, since the day the agreement was signed, Israeli attacks have killed over 1,400 Palestinians, including at least 327 children (Al Jazeera, aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/9/gaza-ceasefire-exists-in-name-only-more-than-100-ngos-say).

The denunciation comes as the conflict continues to produce daily casualties. On 10 October 2026, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least eight people were killed in Israeli attacks, including an eight-year-old girl (Al Jazeera, aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/10/israeli-forces-kill-six-in-gaza-including-a-child). The figure comes from a single local institutional source; no independent verification of the specific day’s toll is currently available.

In the joint statement, Save the Children’s chief executive Inger Ashing summarised the position of the signatory organisations: in her view, a ceasefire is meaningless if it continues to cause the deaths of children (transl. from English). The NGOs are calling for the 2025 agreement to be translated into an effective end to hostilities, not merely a suspension of large-scale military operations.

The gap between the diplomatic announcement and the situation on the ground is the central issue at stake. The agreement of 10 October 2025 was presented as a turning point in a crisis lasting more than two years, but the death toll reported by the signatory organisations — over 1,400 dead in twelve months of a formally standing truce — points to a continuity of military operations that the term “ceasefire” no longer describes in its ordinary sense. The NGOs do not attribute criminal responsibility, nor do they classify the events as crimes: the statement simply records a discrepancy between the agreement’s nominal status and the health data gathered on the ground.

The question of independent verification of the figures remains open. The overall death toll for the twelve months cited by the NGOs comes from their own statement, while the figure for 10 October comes from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a local authority with direct access to hospital data but without independent external oversight of the specific incident. The two sources are independent of each other — a coalition of international organisations and a local health authority — but neither has been corroborated by a third party for the specific incident of 10 October.

The contrast between the NGOs’ figures and the diplomatic narrative surrounding the 2025 agreement remains the point on which the truce’s political durability will be measured in the coming months: the joint statement was published precisely on the anniversary, signalling that the signatory organisations intend to keep public pressure on the issue.