By Tony Pentimalli
The war has gone quiet, but not still. In Gaza, silence now sounds like breathing through dust. For the first time in two years, no one runs for the shelter of a doorway when the air cracks. President Trump stood in front of flags and called it a “historic peace,” his chin lifted toward the cameras as if light itself were proof of victory. The same image now fills magazine covers, the posture of salvation, the gaze of a man convinced that history bends to his reflection. But the truth is simpler and more cruel. This ceasefire was not negotiated into being. It was starved into existence, a pause in killing mistaken for the end of war.
Under the terms signed in Sharm el Sheikh, Hamas freed the last 20 living Israeli hostages. Israel began releasing just under 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, roughly 250 serving long sentences and about 1,700 held without charge since the war began. Humanitarian convoys are now crossing daily, hundreds of trucks carrying flour, antibiotics, and clean water into what used to be a city. Israeli forces will reposition but not withdraw. The ceasefire’s enforcement remains a promise. A multinational monitoring force exists only in draft statements.
Trump has already branded the moment as proof that “only I could have done this.” Netanyahu called it “a necessary act of strength.” In Washington, officials briefed reporters that up to 200 U.S. personnel may help verify compliance. Yet the real architects were Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, who carried the burden of negotiation while famine and public shame forced momentum.
Even Trump’s fiercest critics can admit that the ceasefire happened on his watch. But credit without conscience is theater, not statesmanship. The question is not who signed the paper. It is what price was paid for him to hold the pen.
What the cameras recorded was theater. What the diplomats managed was triage.
And yet, for a moment, the world believed in the photo. TIME’s red border framed Trump as a sunlit monument, his face rising into an empty sky. The headline read “His Triumph.” Below it, another line: “How Gaza Heals.” The irony is unbearable. Gaza does not heal. It endures. Healing presumes an end to pain, and Gaza has never been granted that luxury. What the world calls recovery is the slow accounting of what has been lost, a calculus of survival that begins with ruins.
The United Nations says more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, and tens of thousands more wounded. Over 190,000 buildings are damaged or destroyed, according to UNOSAT satellite analysis. Nine of every ten residents have been displaced. Power grids, hospitals, and schools are gone. Even if the bombs never fall again, Gaza will remain uninhabitable without a decade of rebuilding that no one has yet promised to fund.
Ismail Zayda walked back to Sheikh Radwan carrying what was left of his belongings in a plastic sack. “Thank God my house is still standing,” he told Reuters. “But the place is destroyed, my neighbors’ houses are destroyed, entire districts have gone.” The roof above him sagged, the walls pocked with holes where shrapnel had torn through his kitchen. A neighbor pointed to the crater where her son’s bedroom used to be. “We just want to live in peace,” she said quietly, her voice nearly drowned by the hum of the first aid trucks rolling past.
Nearby, Mahdi Saqla stood beside a tent pitched over the ruins of his home in central Gaza. “Of course there are no homes, they’ve been destroyed, but we are happy just to return to where our homes were, even over the rubble,” he said. That small word return has become the new definition of victory.
Trump’s ceremony in Cairo lasted 27 minutes. Cameras caught him smiling beside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as they signed. The American delegation spoke of “stability.” None mentioned accountability. Not one reference was made to the airstrikes on hospitals, the mass civilian deaths, or the forced displacement of nearly two million people. The president framed the moment as “the start of something beautiful.” It was a sentence polished for headlines, not history.
In Gaza, people listened to his speech through crackling radios. “The people in Gaza, including me, lost everything,” said writer Ahmed Abu Artema, who survived the bombing of Rafah. “We lost our beloved ones. We lost our houses. We lost everything.” His words, spoken into a phone line, carried no politics, only the exhaustion of someone still alive in a place that no longer exists.
The ceasefire’s durability is already in question. Hamas remains armed and visible, redeploying police in northern sectors. Israel insists on controlling airspace, border crossings, and the flow of aid. No verified disarmament mechanism exists. Every prior truce, 1994, 2014, 2021, collapsed under smaller contradictions than these. A single rocket, a raid, or a misread order could ignite it all again.
Every ceasefire in this conflict begins with the same hope and ends with the same arithmetic. There can be no lasting peace while Gaza’s fate is managed rather than governed, while borders remain closed, and while the people trapped behind them are denied any vision of a future. Diplomats may call this stability, but history calls it repetition. Until the architecture of peace exists, governance, accountability, and freedom of movement, this ceasefire is not an ending but an interval. Peace without structure is only intermission.
Across the region, the reaction has been measured and tense. Iran has not withdrawn its rhetorical support for “resistance.” Hezbollah remains mobilized in southern Lebanon. The Egyptian and Jordanian governments have urged restraint, fearing that any spark could spill over. In Washington, aides privately describe the truce as “fragile but necessary.” No one calls it permanent.
The humanitarian agencies are preparing for the impossible, to rebuild without sovereignty. Gaza’s crossings still operate at Israel’s discretion. Shipments of cement and steel are restricted. Water must be tested before use. Israel’s Defense Ministry controls electricity imports. Aid workers warn that reconstruction cannot proceed without a stable authority, yet neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has been granted that role. The result is governance by vacuum, a strip ruled by checkpoints and paperwork.
Legal accountability remains as absent as leadership. The International Criminal Court has announced only preliminary examinations. Israel rejects its jurisdiction. The U.S. dismisses it outright. Trump’s envoy to the UN called such investigations “politically motivated witch hunts.” In practice, the world has accepted a moral exchange rate in which 67,000 dead civilians equal one televised handshake and one glossy cover declaring triumph.
When Ismail Zayda sleeps now, he says he dreams of sound, not silence, but sound. “I dream of hearing my wife cooking,” he told reporters. “The clatter of plates, my children arguing, the call to prayer.” His neighborhood has none of it. The quiet is too complete.
This is what peace looks like in 2025. It is not safety or justice. It is the moment when the noise of war stops long enough for the world to congratulate itself. Trump calls it success. Netanyahu calls it strength. But for the people who live beneath the wreckage, peace is just the brief hour between the funerals and the next warning.
The image of Trump cast against the sky, jaw lifted toward the sun, will circulate for decades, the photograph of a man elevated by a silence he does not hear. But beneath that silence, a city still mourns in the dark. If the world cannot hear Gaza’s quiet and feel shame, then peace itself has become another word for distance.
Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social.