Ramallah, West Bank - As the war on Gaza enters its third year, Israel killed at least 70 Palestinians over the weekend, adding to a death toll that stands at around 67,000 lives, but which, in reality, is likely several times higher.
Most of the dead this weekend were in famine-struck Gaza City, where the army has pressed a renewed offensive, pushing residents further south and targeting a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi - a designated “safe” zone.
The grim toll underscores how the two-year mark of Israel’s war, labelled a genocide by the UN, is arriving amid intensifying military operations, deepening humanitarian collapse, and high-stakes diplomacy.
The 20-point peace plan announced by US President Donald Trump last week is the most significant diplomatic initiative so far to end the war, but much uncertainty remains.
Israel says it supports the framework, but had insisted on last-minute amendments, while Hamas has signalled a conditional “yes” to some provisions and “negotiations” on others.
Two years of war: A relentless cost in lives
Palestinian analysts across the political spectrum agree that Hamas’s 7 October attack was a pivotal moment that shattered assumptions and exposed the fragility of an international and regional order that had sought to push the Palestinian question to the margins.
But they also stress the cost. Over 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, tens of thousands wounded and detained, entire neighbourhoods erased, and starvation has been used as a weapon of war, causing famine across the besieged territory.
Aid groups, legal experts, and, most recently, a UN report, have all labelled Israel’s war as a genocide.
Amid ongoing diplomatic efforts, Gaza City remains under intensified assault and mass displacement orders have pushed civilians south into overcrowded districts as famine rages and infrastructure collapses.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that roughly half of Gaza’s hospitals function only partially, while Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warns that fuel scarcity threatens neonatal intensive care and surgery.
Policy researcher and director of the Masarat strategic studies think tank, Hani Al-Masri, called the last two years of war “a major loss paid in the blood and bodies of the Palestinian people”.
Strategically, Hamas’s 7 October operation exposed the permeability of Israeli deterrence, an inflection point analysts say has implications for Israel’s regional standing and internal cohesion. But in response, Israel has accelerated a military doctrine that could erase the Palestinian cause.
“Israel occupied Gaza, increased the pace of settlement expansion in the West Bank, and is working to implement the annexation and expansion plan in the West Bank quietly, announcing several times that it intends to annex and impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank,” Al-Masri says.
Deterrence punctured, geopolitics scrambled
Militarily, 7 October ripped through core security assumptions about the conflict, says Al-Masri.
“The Al-Aqsa Flood revealed that the theory of Israeli deterrence power is penetrable,” Al-Masri added, “and this affects Israel’s status, its future role in global politics, and its internal cohesion”.
Israel today faces both internal and external crises, with escalating disputes between the government and the military establishment and political opposition, in addition to public demonstrations opposing government policy.
Those fractures play out alongside diplomatic strain and international legal pressure, with rights organisations and UN bodies documenting war crimes amid escalated ground operations and mass evacuations in Gaza City.
“Historical events are not measured by loss or gain,” says Ahmed Rafiq Awad, director of Al-Quds Studies Center.
The point, he says, is not to tally gains against losses, but to acknowledge a century-long arc in the national liberation struggle with Israel, in which 7 October is a part of a continuum.
“We lost various uprisings since the 1920s because we are facing a very strong enemy backed by imperial powers, while we are isolated and weak with no support or strategic depth,” Awad said.
He believes that the past two years have forced the world to re-engage with the Palestinian question.
“The issue now resonates on European streets, where weekend marches in Barcelona, Rome, Lisbon, and London condemn the war and demand a ceasefire, with hundreds of arrests reported in the UK, another sign that public opinion has shifted in ways governments must now navigate,” Awad says.
“7 October was a real earthquake on all levels, in awareness, politics, and geography.”
The Palestinian cause: From marginalisation to renewed centrality
Suleiman Bsharat, director of Yabous for Consulting and Strategic Studies, insists the war’s ferocity was not a mechanical reaction to Hamas’s attack but part of a longer pattern.
“What happened in terms of killing, destruction, and genocide was inevitable because Israel has been killing and destroying since the beginning of the occupation in 1948, and the Palestinian people have been paying the political price with their blood and land,” says Bsharat.
“Before 7 October, Netanyahu stood at the United Nations to announce his map, excluding and sidelining the Palestinian issue,” adds Bsharat, emphasising that Israel has been advancing the marginalisation of Palestinian rights for many years.
Hamas’s attack, he says, returned the Palestinian question to the top of the Arab, Islamic, regional, and international agenda.
“The slew of international recognitions at the UNGA could not have been achieved diplomatically if it weren’t for the sacrifices and resilience of the Palestinian people, which forced the world to act. This recognition is an important achievement,” he adds.
Today, he continues, there is a transformation in Western capitals, universities, and cultural forces worldwide away from blindly supporting Israel to gradually isolating it.
“This has never happened before, but today it is happening in the context of genocide.”
Hamas and Trump's plan
Al-Masri says Hamas’s reaction to Washington’s latest gambit is an important gain.
“Hamas’s response to Trump’s plan was smart, responsible, and positive. The group agreed to hand over governance to the Palestinian Authority,” says Al-Masri.
“They welcomed American efforts regarding the release of all prisoners as part of an exchange deal, while keeping the door open for negotiations on details, timelines, and guarantees.”
He also commends Hamas’ rejection of international guardianship in Gaza, demanding a Palestinian local administration within a national consensus framework, leaving decisions on clauses related to national rights to the national collective.
The text of the 20-point plan aligns with that outline, front-loading a hostage-prisoner exchange, a phased withdrawal, and technocratic governance, while making demilitarisation and no political role for Hamas explicit US conditions.
For Bsharat, the wider consequence is a strategic recalibration by Western capitals.
“The concept of power that Israel sought to use for oppression has become part of the burden that the Western world and the United States now bear, realising that absolute support at a certain moment becomes a constraint on security and stability standards in the world and undermines the strategic interests that the United States built with the region as a whole,” said Bsharat.
Deterrence, diplomacy, and unanswered questions
However, Al-Masri stressed that there are no settled outcomes.
“The final word has not yet been said, and we must wait until the final results emerge before we make an assessment,” he said.
Al-Masri says it is still unclear if there will be a return to the pre-7 October status quo or whether there could be progress towards achieving Palestinian rights.
“Will the Palestinian Authority and Hamas withdraw from Gaza for a limited period? Will there be progress toward establishing a Palestinian state, not just recognition of it? Will there be Arab normalisation with Israel?” Masri says. “These questions are open.”
But Bsharat believes that international sympathy for Palestinians can be converted into momentum for statehood.
“Palestinian steps must be activated on several tracks within a unified national program intersecting with an Arab-Islamic-international vision to build on it to achieve support for the rights of the Palestinian people and the establishment of their state,” he said.
In practice, he said, that would mean aligning internal reconciliation, transitional governance, security sector reform, and reconstruction with a credible diplomatic horizon.
“Whether Trump’s plan - if it survives battlefield realities - can host that alignment will be tested in the coming days and weeks,” he added.
Awad, for his part, cautions against premature verdicts.
In a conflict measured in displacements and decades of violence, he sees Hamas’s attack and the ensuing war not as a terminal point but as “an important development and part of the long historical movement”.
The test, two years on, is whether the world’s newly attentive gaze yields structures, ceasefire guarantees, access to aid, legal protections, and a political horizon that can outlast the daily churn of headlines from Gaza City’s ruins and al-Mawasi’s tents.
“Meanwhile, the present remains unforgiving, families bury their dead, hospitals ration electricity and oxygen, and evacuation orders continue as the UN reports intensifying strikes and a worsening famine.”
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.