Has the World Forgotten Gaza?

The cameras have moved on, but Gaza’s people still need hospitals, homes, food and schools. Surviving the war was only the beginning.

The world has become distracted by another war.

Iran, the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz now dominate international headlines, while Gaza, once almost permanently on the world’s television screens, has slipped steadily down the news agenda. But for the Palestinians living there, the catastrophe did not disappear when the cameras turned elsewhere.

A US-brokered ceasefire in October 2025 brought an end to the most intensive phase of a war which had already devastated much of Gaza. It did not bring complete peace, with Israeli operations continuing against what Israel describes as Hamas threats and Palestinians accusing Israel of repeatedly violating the truce.

The violence continues. Israeli strikes on September 6 killed at least four Palestinians, including an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy, according to Palestinian health officials cited by Reuters. Israel said one strike was aimed at a Hamas militant and that it continued to assess the result of the operation.

More than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed since the October ceasefire, most of them civilians according to Reuters, while Israel has reported four soldiers killed. Those deaths are a reminder that a ceasefire and peace are not necessarily the same thing.

Yet there is another Gaza story which casualty figures alone cannot adequately tell.

What happens to the survivors?

Much of Gaza’s housing, health, educational, water, sanitation and economic infrastructure was destroyed or badly damaged during the war. Families who survived bombardment now confront the much slower struggle of rebuilding ordinary life.

A tent can provide emergency shelter. It cannot reasonably become a housing policy.

Families need homes with water, sanitation, electricity and security. Children need somewhere permanent to sleep and study, while people with disabilities, the elderly and those recovering from serious injuries require accommodation designed for something more than immediate survival.

The same applies to medicine. Keeping an injured person alive is only the first stage of healthcare, particularly after a conflict which produced large numbers of amputees, burn victims and people suffering complex injuries.

Gaza needs functioning hospitals, operating theatres, medicines, diagnostic equipment and trained medical staff. It also needs rehabilitation, prosthetics, physiotherapy and long-term treatment for people whose injuries will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Mental health may prove an even larger challenge. Children have experienced bombardment, displacement, bereavement, hunger and repeated disruption to almost every part of ordinary childhood, often over several formative years.

Then there is food.

Emergency food aid can prevent starvation, but permanently feeding a population from trucks and distribution centres is neither economic recovery nor food security. Gaza must eventually regain the ability to produce, import, distribute and buy food through something resembling a functioning economy.

One remarkable effort is already under way.

Reuters reported last week that Palestinian farmers are rebuilding a seed bank destroyed during the conflict. The original collection contained around 70 tonnes of seeds representing 42 native crops; a smaller replacement has now assembled 32 heirloom varieties in a makeshift tent in central Gaza.

The significance is greater than the size of the seed collection.

Native seeds can be replanted and adapted to local conditions, giving farmers a measure of independence from continuously imported hybrid seed. Yet much of Gaza’s agricultural land remains inaccessible, destroyed or within areas controlled by Israel or close to the so-called Yellow Line, making cultivation difficult and sometimes dangerous.

Before the war, agriculture supported the livelihoods of approximately 560,000 people in Gaza. Restoring farmland is therefore not merely about producing tomatoes, wheat or vegetables; it is about restoring incomes and allowing families eventually to feed themselves rather than remaining indefinitely dependent upon humanitarian assistance.

Perhaps nowhere is the long-term challenge greater than education.

A child can survive without attending school for a week. Losing months becomes damaging. Losing years begins to alter the trajectory of an entire generation.

Schools are not simply buildings in which lessons take place. They are where children learn routine, social interaction and the expectation that there is a future worth preparing for.

Universities matter for precisely the same reason.

Gaza will eventually need doctors, engineers, teachers, nurses, architects, technicians and administrators to rebuild it. Destroying or allowing the collapse of the educational system therefore creates an extraordinary contradiction: the people most desperately needed for reconstruction are being denied the opportunity to acquire the skills required to carry it out.

There is also the question of where Palestinians will ultimately live.

Recent proposals by Israeli far-right politicians for the large-scale “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza have renewed fears of permanent displacement. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said at the weekend that Washington does not support any plan to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza.

That distinction matters enormously.

Reconstruction cannot credibly mean rebuilding Gaza somewhere other than Gaza.

If the international community believes Palestinians should have a viable future in their own territory, the test will not be the number of emergency tents delivered but whether permanent homes, hospitals, schools, universities, businesses, farms, water systems and electricity networks are actually restored.

Israel has legitimate security concerns following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks which killed around 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages being taken into Gaza. Any durable settlement must address Israel’s security as well as the future governance of Gaza and the question of Hamas and other armed groups.

But security and reconstruction cannot indefinitely be treated as mutually exclusive.

A generation raised among ruins, dependent upon aid and deprived of education, employment and any realistic expectation of a normal life is hardly a recipe for long-term security for Palestinians or Israelis.

The international community mobilised extraordinary amounts of money, diplomacy and humanitarian assistance during the war. The more difficult commitment may be maintaining that attention after the television cameras have gone.

Because reconstruction is less dramatic than bombardment. Reopening a school does not produce the pictures that a missile strike does, while repairing a sewage system rarely leads an international news bulletin.

Yet those are precisely the things upon which Gaza’s future now depends.

The question is therefore no longer simply whether enough aid reaches Gaza tomorrow morning. It is whether Palestinians are being given the means to build a life in which they will eventually no longer require that aid.

Food must become food security. Tents must become homes. Field hospitals must become functioning healthcare. Temporary classrooms must become schools and universities. Humanitarian survival must eventually become economic life.

Otherwise the world will have achieved the extraordinary feat of keeping people alive without giving them much of a life to return to.

Be that as it may, Gaza’s children survived a war they did not start. The world should not now ask them to inherit its ruins.