Confined by design: the human cost of protracted displacement

Since 1967, Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation - a status the International Court of Justice found unlawful in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, stipulating that Israel has an obligation to end it as rapidly as possible. As the occupying power, Israel bears specific, binding obligations under international humanitarian law: to facilitate relief for the population under its control, to refrain from forcible population transfer, and to refrain from collective punishment. These obligations are the standard against which the findings below should be read. 

The October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza was supposed to end civilians' suffering. Nearly a year on, it exists largely in name only. Displacement in Gaza has not ended; it has changed shape. Where the defining feature of the war's first two years was movement — frequent, forced, and often violent — the defining feature of the period since the ceasefire is confinement: a demarcation line, the Yellow Line, that has moved in only one direction since its creation; a return permitted in name but foreclosed in practice; and a population left with nowhere further to retreat within Gaza's own shrinking boundaries. This is protracted displacement, and it represents the continuation of a deliberate policy – a pattern that independent investigators, including Human Rights Watch, have characterised as “part of a state policy” of forced displacement, and which the UN’s own Independent International Commission of Inquiry has separately found reflects "a consistent pattern of conduct" by the Israeli authorities. 

Drawing on 20 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) and 195 respondents across five governorates, this report sets out what that confinement means in concrete terms. Living conditions remain severe and largely unchanged by the ceasefire: overcrowded sites, unsafe water and sanitation, and rodent infestation feature across most communities consulted. Insecurity has also not ended — civilians continue to be killed and injured near the Yellow Line, in a security environment that resembles, for many, a seemingly free-fire zone rather than an established front line. Aid delivery remains obstructed at every stage: by movement restrictions tied to the Yellow Line and the Orange Line governing humanitarian access; by an opaque and expansive "dual-use" regime that blocks even pest-control and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) materials; and by the mandatory re-registration of international NGOs, which has left dozens of organisations, including DRC, severely constrained in their operations.  

Site Management is one of the few interventions shown, in this report's data, to meaningfully close that gap, but it does not reach most of the population that needs it. Most of Gaza's active displacement sites — 1,090 of 1,7397 have no designated Site Management actor. Where one is present, outcomes across water, sanitation, health access, and dignity are consistently and measurably better. At the same time, recovery needs have grown by a third, while donor and political attention have moved in the opposite direction, fading fast while the humanitarian emergency continues. 

None of this has broken the population living through it. The persistence of community solidarity is the single most consistent finding in these data after displacement and aid obstruction — but it is not evidence that current conditions are manageable. It is evidence of what people have had to build for themselves in the sustained absence of an adequate response: neighbours standing in for family, informal networks substituting for referral pathways that do not reach most sites, and daily improvisation replacing materials still blocked at the border. 

This report closes with recommendations to three groups of actors whose decisions will determine what happens next: 1) parties to the conflict, to uphold the ceasefire, protect civilians, enable humanitarian access, and end practices that perpetuate displacement; 2) UN Member States and the international community, to use their diplomatic, legal, political, and financial tools to uphold international law, protect humanitarian space, and support Palestinian-led recovery; and 3) donors and humanitarian actors, to adapt funding and programming to the realities of protracted displacement, strengthen Site Management and protection support, and invest in early recovery alongside emergency relief. Together, these recommendations address both the immediate conditions confronting displaced Palestinians and the policies and constraints that continue to prevent displacement from being resolved.