A Ceasefire in Name Only: UN Warns of Ethnic Cleansing as Gaza Death Toll Passes 1,580

 

The United Nations' human rights office has warned that Israeli forces in Gaza are continuing to displace Palestinians and that their actions "continue to raise concerns of ethnic cleansing", a year after a ceasefire was supposed to have taken hold. In a statement issued on Friday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said Palestinians were being repeatedly displaced into an ever-shrinking fraction of the besieged enclave, as the Israeli military pushes its deployment line — known as the "Yellow Line" — further westward.

According to the OHCHR, Israeli forces "appear to treat the yellow line as a kill zone", preventing Palestinians from returning to what remains of their homes on the other side, while destroying remaining civilian infrastructure and attacking displacement sites. The agency documented the westward expansion of the Israeli military over the past two weeks, triggering new displacement in Shujayea in Gaza City and in eastern Bureij, eastern Deir el-Balah and eastern al-Maghazi in central Gaza. It also reported that an Israeli drone dropped munitions on a tent housing displaced Palestinians at the Shujayea junction on Sunday.

The warning comes as Israeli attacks continue despite the ceasefire that took effect on October 11, 2025. At least four Palestinians were killed in attacks on Saturday, including a teacher, Diaa Abu al-Rous, in shelling of the Nuseirat refugee camp, according to al-Awda Hospital. Medics said an air strike killed Akram Yassin and his wife Dina Abu Baker in an apartment in Gaza City, and a 17-year-old boy was shot dead by Israeli gunfire near Khan Younis. At least six Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past 48 hours, according to the enclave's Ministry of Health, bringing the number killed since the ceasefire to at least 1,580, with 5,711 wounded.

The OHCHR said Israel's stated aim is to increase its military deployment area to 70 percent of Gaza's territory. The overall toll of the war, which began in October 2023, now stands at more than 74,500 Palestinians killed and over 175,800 wounded, according to Gaza's health authorities, with 839 bodies recovered from under the rubble since the ceasefire began. The humanitarian situation is worsening on other fronts too: the World Food Programme has stopped providing food to half a million people in Gaza over a lack of funding, and Israeli forces have carried out large-scale demolitions of buildings east of Gaza City's al-Tuffah neighbourhood.

Israel has not responded in detail to the OHCHR's latest statement, but the pattern it describes has been building for weeks. In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Israeli settlers shot dead a Palestinian man and wounded another during a raid on the village of Yasuf, north of Ramallah, on Thursday. The ceasefire, brokered by the United States, was meant to halt the killing and open the way to reconstruction and a political settlement. A year on, neither has arrived.

For the displaced families living in tents pressed against the Yellow Line, the abstraction of a ceasefire means little. In Reddit threads in r/Palestine this week, displaced Palestinians in Gaza's Bir 19 area, near the line in southern Gaza, said their tents faced daily Israeli gunfire, including explosive rounds that penetrate the protective sand barriers around them (https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1xpetb8/displaced_palestinians_in_gazas_bir_19_area_near/). The UN's warning puts a name to what they have been describing for months: a ceasefire that exists on paper while the ground beneath it keeps shrinking.