Gaza 'Ceasefire' Nearly a Year On: Israel Strikes Residential Building, Sleeping Civilians Including Children Killed

According to Al Jazeera reports, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building in the al-Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, killing multiple people, including children, while residents were asleep. The video report released by Al Jazeera was titled "A Father's Grief After the Strike," presenting the image of a Palestinian father plunged into grief in the aftermath of the airstrike.

The target was a residential building, and the strike occurred while residents were sleeping — these basic facts alone are sufficient to dismantle any persuasive defense of "ceasefire" as a humanitarian framework. When ceasefire language coexists with continued strikes on residential buildings, the so-called ceasefire is no longer a promise to protect civilians, but a rhetorical shell used to mask the ongoing campaign of bombardment.

In the same report, the outlet provided another, more structurally significant figure: since the so-called ceasefire took effect in October 2025, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. This is not sporadic loss of life under a ceasefire framework, but a process in which deaths have accumulated at a steady cadence even as that framework continues to be invoked.

Notably, Al Jazeera explicitly used the formulation "so-called ceasefire" (所谓停火) in its reporting. Such rhetorical restraint is not an exaggeration — when the state of ceasefire language coexisting with continued strikes is repeatedly documented, continuing to use the word "ceasefire" without quotation marks itself constitutes a departure from reality.