JERUSALEM — Things were beginning to feel a bit less catastrophic for Nazeh Hillis, at least by Gaza standards.
His injured spine, largely untreated since a wall collapsed on him during an Israeli air raid nine months ago, was still in agony, leaving him incontinent and unable to stand. But by late February, at least there was more sugar and flour for sale near his refugee camp. And a charity was giving his family a tray of rice with a few pieces of chicken to break their Ramadan fast each evening.
Best of all, Israel had partially reopened the border crossing to Egypt on Feb. 2 for the first time in two years, allowing a trickle of Gazans to leave for medical care. Hillis and his wife, who has uterine cancer, were expecting any day to reach a hospital that could help them.
Then, on the morning of Feb. 28, Israel and the United States began hitting Tehran with missiles. Everything stopped again.
“I almost collapsed,” Hillis said of the moment he learned that Israel had slammed the crossings shut again, both for food aid coming in and sick, injured Gazans going out. “It wasn’t the time for another war,” he said. “The people of Gaza are always the ones who pay the highest price.”
Gaza’s 2 million citizens are accustomed to waiting for a world that has other things on its mind. But the attacks on Iran have led to a particularly cruel reprise of that script, closing the doors for now on perhaps the closest thing to progress Gaza had experienced in years.
To feed the people, Israel has reopened one crossing with new security requirements for about 200 trucks a day. Officials would not say when the flow might rebound to prewar levels or when they would reopen the crossing into Egypt.
“The whole world is now preoccupied with the war on Iran, but the pressures on Gaza remain in place,” Mustafa Ibrahim, a human rights activist and political commentator in Gaza, said in a phone interview. “The Israeli army controls half of the Gaza Strip, the crossings are closed. No one is talking about it. Everyone is busy with themselves.”
How long it stays that way may depend on how the battle with Iran plays out. A prolonged war risks becoming a prolonged distraction, leaving Gaza’s reconstruction promises in limbo while emboldening Israeli hard-liners who have never accepted the ceasefire as the final word on Hamas.
“You see what is happening in Iran,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a television interview Friday, pledging to go after Hamas again militarily unless the group puts down its arms. “We will not abandon [Gaza], that is where it all began,” Katz said. “There will be no Hamas there to pose a threat.”
Meanwhile, as Israel focuses on Iran, Hamas is not so quietly continuing to rebuild its police, courts and civil administration in the roughly half of Gaza where it is restoring its reach into everyday life. The group has officers directing traffic at some intersections, reopened some schools and announced new vehicle license plate requirements over the weekend.
“Hamas is present now in a clear and prominent way,” Ibrahim said. “It’s imposing control over people. It’s a de facto authority existing on the ground.”
Gaza remains a landscape of rubble. More than 80 percent of all structures have been damaged in three years of bombardment, according to U.N. estimates. Conditions were daunting even before the bombing of Iran started. But the trends had at least started to bend in better directions.
Five months into a shaky ceasefire, the scale of Israeli strikes in Gaza had diminished, though they have never stopped. Attacks have killed at least 648 Palestinians since the ceasefire began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry — a grim toll, but a fraction of the 70,000 killed and more than 170,000 injured during of the full-scale war.
Food aid had increased enough to allow many families an average of two small meals a day, according to the World Food Program. The pace of aid and commercial deliveries had picked up, although aid groups said Israel was still letting in fewer than the 600 trucks a day that it had agreed to under the ceasefire deal it signed Oct. 10. Israeli officials dispute that claim.
Even before the disruptions that followed the strikes on Iran, more than 1.5 million people were expected to face acute food insecurity into spring of this year, according to the World Health Organization. But the famine-level scarcity declared in parts of Gaza last year have eased significantly, the WHO said.
Humanitarian groups were distributing more meals in displacement camps, according to residents. Prices had stabilized in many parts of the enclave. Hilliss, 46, a construction worker, said flour that had reached as much as 100 shekels a kilogram (about $32) during the months he referred to as “the famine times” had recently dropped to 10 shekels or less.
When Ramadan began Feb. 18, some Gazans said they were able to observe the holiest month of the Muslim calendar without endless war on the horizon for the first time since 2023.
“This Ramadan is better,” Hillis said, in part because he had reason to hope he would soon get out.
The Rafah crossing, sealed since Israel seized it in May 2024, had partially reopened on Feb. 2. Over the first two weeks, more than 500 Palestinian patients and companions managed to leave, according to the Israeli media, against a backlog of nearly 20,000 needing treatment. Only half of all hospitals in Gaza are even partially functional, the WHO said.
Hillis, who has platinum plates in his spine and needs surgery no Gaza hospital can perform, expected his name to appear on the evacuation list. His wife, Abeer, 39, is waiting, too — she has spreading uterine cancer and two with developmental disabilities damage to care for.
“I feel like I’m clinging to a feather,” she said, “waiting for the smallest sign of hope.”
The picture outside Gaza had brightened a bit, as well.
On Feb. 19, nine days before the Iran strikes, President Donald Trump had convened the inaugural gathering of the Board of Peace, the international body he created to oversee Gaza’s governance and reconstruction. Meeting with fanfare in Washington, nine nations pledged a combined $7 billion for reconstruction; five countries committed troops to an international stabilization force; and Trump announced a $10 billion U.S. contribution — though it was unclear where the money would come from or whether Congress would authorize it.
The Palestinian committee meant to govern Gaza in the interim — a 15-member technocratic body led by Ali Shaath, a former Palestinian Authority official — was waiting in Cairo for orders to enter Gaza, although a timetable was unclear.
When Israeli and American forces attacked Tehran Feb. 28, killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the first wave of strikes, the Israeli military sealed Gaza at once, citing security concerns and the threat of missile strikes from Iran.
The halt of cargo trucks caused immediate food shocks in the most vulnerable areas, residents said. Aid groups warned that their stocks held little to no reserves.
“We need food deliveries every single day to feed hungry families who are not part of this war,” said José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian group that had been serving 1 million meals a day in Gaza.
Residents reported panic-buying and sharp price spikes. Black market dynamics took over.
“If the entry of goods stops for more than a day, prices go back to what they were during the war,” said Rami Haroon, 47, a dentist in Zawayda. “Cigarettes had come down but now have reached insane levels.”
The military campaign to topple the Iranian government has also raised new questions about the Board of Peace.
Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation and an early contributor of troops to a proposed Gaza stabilization force — warned last week that it could quit the initiative amid domestic criticism. Gulf Arab states that have bankrolled the board also might pull back funding, squeezed by the economic fallout of Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
The attack on Iran has had more immediate practical effects as well. A person familiar with the Peace Board’s internal workings said disarmament talks with Hamas had been frozen by the travel disruptions and airspace closures that followed the Feb. 28 strikes.
“Since the war started, things kind of froze,” this person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. A disarmament “consultation” was expected this week, the person said.
What comes next for Gaza will likely depend on what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does after the military operation against Iran that he began with Trump, the broker of the Gaza ceasefire.
Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners have never made peace with Trump’s Gaza plan, which foresees a shrinking Israeli military presence, the deployment of an international security force and a highly conditional pathway to Palestinian statehood.
If Israel emerges having crippled the Islamic republic, some hard-liners will argue the moment has arrived to go back into Gaza and destroy what remains of Hamas down to the last Kalashnikov — no matter what the ceasefire deal says.
But the Iran operation could also leave Netanyahu more beholden to Trump than ever, making it even harder for Israel to resist any of the Gaza peace plan.
“I think this idea from many Israeli politicians, that immediately after the war with Iran and Hezbollah ends we will be able to go back and smash Hamas, is wishful thinking,” said Michael Milstein of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, an Israeli think tank, and a former adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli military.
“Netanyahu could have even less room to maneuver,” Milstein said.
However the geopolitics unfold, the people of Gaza remain waiting in the ruins of their neighborhoods.
Abeer Salah, 28, was on the verge of leaving Gaza to resume her studies in Spain on a scholarship. Something like normal life seemed to be coming soon. Instead, war returned.
“The Iranian war came to rob me of my dream,” she said. “Our lives are held hostage.”
Adam Taylor in Washington D.C. and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
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