Harvest of 2025 in Gaza.. Year of Hunger and Destruction

The year 2025 witnessed pivotal transformations in the course of the war in the Gaza Strip, where Gaza starved to death, and there were countless numbers of martyrs, wounded, missing, and displaced. As the end of the year approaches, Gazans await an improvement in the situation and the reconstruction of what was destroyed by the Israeli war.

The "Special Window from Gaza" segment shed light on the developments and successive events that the Gaza Strip experienced during 2025 through a report that reviewed the year's harvest, and hosted analysts and observers who spoke about future prospects, and what Palestinians in Gaza anticipate in 2026, especially regarding their tragic humanitarian conditions.

At the beginning of 2025, the then-elected US President Donald Trump assigned the task to his special envoy Steve Witkoff, and the time frame was to sign an agreement to end the war before Trump entered the White House. In mid-January of last year, an agreement was reached to cease fire, which entered into force on the 19th of the same month, and included 3 phases, the most prominent of which was Israel's complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The agreement lasted only weeks, as at the beginning of March last year, Israel resumed extensive military operations in the sector, effectively ending the truce on March 18 last year by launching a massive air attack, and the war returned with greater ferocity, and the sector entered a new phase of humanitarian suffering.

In mid-April, while the war entered its eighteenth month, Qatari and Egyptian efforts continued to resume the ceasefire through the resumption of talks in Cairo, and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announced its readiness to conclude a deal to end the war that includes the release of all remaining Israeli prisoners in one batch and a truce for 5 years.

However, Hamas's offer was met by Benjamin Netanyahu's government with the approval of the mini-cabinet at the beginning of May 2025 of the "Gideon Chariots" operation to fully occupy the Gaza Strip, and Israel launched the "Gideon Chariots 2" operation at the beginning of September last year to fully occupy the city of Gaza and displace Palestinians from it.

The war on the towers of Gaza City began, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee south under the lava of air and artillery bombardment.

In this atmosphere, the US President proposed a new proposal through his envoy Witkoff aimed at finding a diplomatic solution before the Israeli military operation, ensuring a comprehensive solution for the release of all Israeli prisoners in exchange for ending the war.

The Hamas delegation met in Doha to study the American proposal on September 9 last year, and during the meeting, Israel bombed the Hamas leadership headquarters in the Qatari capital.

International and American efforts doubled to contain the escalation's repercussions, and on September 29, the US President announced a peace plan and war cessation consisting of 20 points, and on October 10 last year, the first phase of the agreement entered into force, and the United States, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey signed the war cessation document during the peace summit in Sharm El-Sheikh.

In November last year, the UN Security Council issued Resolution 2803 welcoming President Trump's plan to end the war on Gaza, and since the agreement entered into force, Israeli violations of its provisions continued, amid delays in transitioning to the second phase.

The most likely scenario

In his commentary on the debate related to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, Thomas Warrick, a former US State Department official, linked the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip to the establishment of the international force and the disarmament of Hamas, noting that Trump will announce on the 6th of next month the deployment of the international force.

As for Bilal Al-Salaima, a lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, he predicted that the most likely scenario is stagnation, because the Israeli side is trying to sabotage the ceasefire agreement and does not want the international force, evidenced by the ongoing Israeli violations in the sector, in addition to no movement on the ground so far regarding the international force, and it is not known where it will be deployed or the mandate that will be given to it.

For his part, the expert on Israeli affairs Jackie Khoury described the current phase as gray, saying that there are political calculations for Netanyahu, suggesting that the current situation in the Gaza Strip will continue for a long time.