The first phase of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is officially known as the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, came into effect on the 10th of October, 2025.
As part of the deal, Israel agreed that its armed forces would retreat to an area on the eastern side of the Gaza Strip, and there would be some form of ostensibly protected zone for the survivors of the genocide established on the other side of this boundary.
In essence, the agreement has seen Gaza partitioned into two separate zones where different rules apply. The line demarcating the boundary between the two started out as an imaginary divider that was also denoted virtually on IDF maps.
It didn’t stay that way for long. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz quickly instructed the defence forces to place large yellow concrete blocks to indicate the new boundary, saying that the markers will stand as a warning for:
‘Hamas terrorists and Gaza residents that any violation or attempt to cross the line will be met with fire.’
These large blocks are why the partition has come to be known as the ‘yellow line.’ Here’s what the markers look like:
From the off, the agreement gives official control of 58% of the Gaza Strip to Israel, with only 42% for the rightful owners of the land. This meant that any Palestinian living in what was henceforth officially-controlled Israeli territory upon the signing of the deal was in severe and immediate danger of being shot and killed. This continues to mean that any Palestinian trying to access anything outside of their inner enclave - their home, a family member or friend, an essential service - may be subject to the most extreme of violence.
There was a deliberate vagueness as to the boundaries along which the yellow line was to run. This was to allow Netanyahu’s Israel room to move as it saw fit. And Israel has done just this. At least 6 of the concrete markers were placed up to 520m further inside the protected side of the now partitioned Gaza Strip than had been laid out in official IDF maps.
On top of the thousands upon thousands of violations by Israel of the peace deal agreed upon, in which 449 Palestinians have been killed and 1,246 have been injured, the Israelis are also slowly but surely chipping away at the sole remaining space where the Palestinians of Gaza have any sort of official protection. By December, the yellow line had already been pushed further into the enclave, and somewhere in the region of 63% of the Gaza Strip had been swallowed up by the occupiers.
It is now the 15th of January 2026. Al Jazeera has just released the findings of its investigation into the ever-expanding yellow line. Hundreds of the yellow concrete blocks which demark the withdrawal zone have been moved further into the protected enclave. Israel has now extended its area of control by 675m. The Israeli modus operandi is to raze everything in its path to the ground once the line has been shifted, and multiple neighbourhoods have been completely demolished in this fashion.
Stage 2 of the Gaza ceasefire agreement stipulates the complete withdrawal of the Israeli Armed Forces from the entire Gaza Strip. The United States announced yesterday, the 14th of January, that it was pushing ahead with this second phase as it believes Hamas was ready to disarm and demilitarise, this also a stipulation of the 20-point plan. Hamas has said it is ready to dissolve its government to allow an apolitical Palestinian committee to take over responsibility for the governance of Gaza. The committee will be overseen by the ‘Board of Peace’, which will be made up various global leaders, including Tony Blair, a person who enjoys zero trust and zero respect across the Middle East for obvious reasons.
Why Hamas would agree to fully disarm and demilitarise when Israel continues to occupy the larger part of Gaza, continues to break the ceasefire with impunity almost on a daily basis, continues to slowly chip away at the only area of Gaza where Palestinians enjoy any level of formal protection and continues to massacre civilians at will (13 civilians, including 5 children were killed by a drone on January the 9th), is absurd in the extreme. Suchwise are the wheels of power when they work upon the powerless, in this case against the poor, innocent and defenceless Palestinian People; everything is made to suit the perpetrator of the genocide.
Nothing about this peace deal is fair, right, just or moral, and that the onus is on Hamas to do anything first, when the apocalyptic death cult and ultimate rogue state known as Zionist Israel has genocided a few hundred thousand Palestinians and pulverised much of Gaza to dust, is yet one more horrifying act of inhumanity that the People of Palestine are being forced to swallow.
Netanyahu and the Israelis know that what is being asked of Hamas is all but impossible. They also know that they win, play it any way you like.
If Hamas accedes to lay down its arms, then there will be one kind of interim political arrangement or another for Palestine, where it will remain in a kind of purgatory between statelessness and statehood ad infinitum. If Hamas don’t agree to disarm and demilitarise, then Israel will use this a pretext to continue the genocide, slowly grinding down the Palestinian People in every sense we can imagine. Either way, Palestine will remain wholly at the mercy of Israel, except now this will be legitimated either by Hamas’s acceptance or rejection of a process where everything suits the criminal and nothing suits the victim.
Trump and his Administration speak of phase 1 and the yellow line as if they are a temporary state of affairs. The Israelis neither act nor speak as if this is true. The Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, Eyal Zamir, said this of the line in December:
‘The “yellow line” is a new border line, serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity.’
In lieu of the partition of Gaza, not only does Israel control most of the Strip, it also controls most of the agricultural land as well as the border crossing into Egypt. Moreover, the advent of the ceasefire has seen Israel ramp up its consolidation of what it now controls and what it is slowly taking surreptitiously, with it building 13 new military outposts in Gaza and along the yellow line. Demolishing every Palestinian structure and building in sight while constructing new checkpoints, outposts and general essential infrastructure in parallel leads any person blessed with reason and good sense to one inescapable conclusion - there is nothing temporary about this.
Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu today (January 15th) deemed the announcement of phase 2 and the formation of a Palestinian governing committee for Gaza nothing more than a ‘declarative move’, rather than anything like an essential stage in a progressional process.
We are witnessing a recalibration of the genocide and a readjustment of the all-encompassing subjugation of Palestine and the Palestinian People. The peace deal for Gaza is simply a means of hiding the unrelenting horror of what’s happening under the aegis of political legitimation. The Israelis know that with the ceasefire agreement any chance for Palestinian statehood can be more than likely quashed, and that they can now legally lay claim to an even greater part of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza has been split in two: on one side is an ever-expanding death zone where any Palestinian entering can be safely liquidated; on the other is an ever-shrinking concentration camp where 2 million people are slowly being exterminated by weather, disease and the Israeli Defence Forces. The world must not stop talking about what is happening in Gaza and Palestine; what Israel has done sits right at the top with the very worst horrors every wrought in human history.
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Their plan is working and it seems there’s nothing the world can do to stop them. Their aim is to make the strip uninhabitable and accelerate their ethnic cleansing of ‘Greater Israel’.
Thank you for your work as always, Mr. Fitzgerald. The injustice and inhumanity of it all is just so tragic and sad, words fail me. The people either get crowded into a tiny space of land with totally inadequate resources, in the midst of awful winter storms and risk freezing to death due to completely inadequate tents, dying of malnutrition or starvation. Or they risk getting shot by occupation "soldiers" for crossing the always shifting line or going about their daily lives trying to survive, it's just awful.