Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
This week marks three years since Hamas’ massacre of October 7 2023, in which some 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians, were killed and 251 taken hostage.
What followed were two years of devastating war waged by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza, which a UN commission of inquiry, leading genocide scholars and major human rights organisations have concluded amounted to genocide. Much of the strip lies in ruins and more than 74,000 Palestinians are dead, with thousands more believed to remain buried under the rubble.
A year ago this week, a US-imposed ceasefire was finally forced on both sides – though mainly on paper. While major IDF assaults have ceased, Israeli attacks in Gaza have continued, in addition to unbridled Jewish settler violence in the West Bank.
Despite this, global attention on Gaza has waned. As the US–Israeli war with Iran began dominating the headlines, earlier pledges by many states to help drive the peace process forward have proved once again wanting, even hollow.
Now, Israel is preparing for a highly polarised parliamentary election on October 27, which could be consequential for the entire region. If a less extreme government takes office, will the world’s attention to Gaza and the West Bank – and the pressure it has generated – hold?
What the peace plan delivered, and what it didn’t
The first phase of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan in Gaza largely succeeded. The remaining living Israeli hostages came home in exchange for close to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, and the remains of deceased hostages were returned over the following months. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans moved back to the north. Israeli forces pulled back to a “yellow line”, and the UN Security Council endorsed the plan and a US-chaired “Board of Peace”.
However, the world’s expectations for “all guns to fall silent” were soon dashed. A year after the ceasefire was signed on October 9 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures the UN uses, reports close to 1,400 Gazans have been killed.
Aid remains restricted, meaningful reconstruction has yet to begin, and another winter is approaching for families living in tents and damaged buildings.
Without sustained international engagement, the second phase of the Trump plan has largely stalled. Hamas has not disarmed. An International Stabilisation Force intended to bring security to Gaza has yet to deploy, despite a US commander being appointed in January. And the technocratic Palestinian committee meant to run Gaza has not taken control on the ground.
Only last week did the Board of Peace unveil a six-month, US$2.45 billion plan to begin rebuilding, but this is a fraction of the US$71.4 billion it estimates recovery will require over a decade.
And all of this depends on Hamas surrendering its weapons. Israel will not allow reconstruction before full disarmament, and Hamas will not disarm on the plan’s terms. Reform of the domestically unpopular Palestinian Authority has been slow, and Israel’s right-wing government has been in campaign mode for months, with strong incentives to spoil the progress.
Recognition of Palestine by more than 150 states has not changed the reality on the ground. The international pressure that helped bring about the ceasefire has proved much harder to sustain since the worst of the violence ended.
Attention faded, but did not disappear
Media and public attention to distant atrocities is notoriously short-lived. It peaks with the most extreme violence and quickly subsides once violence becomes chronic, or once another crisis begins to dominate the news.
Gaza has followed part of this script. As mass casualty bombardments gave way to near-daily “lower-intensity” attacks, headlines receded. The US–Israeli war with Iran, which began in late February, absorbed much of the world’s limited attention span. Ukraine and, in short bursts, Lebanon, competed for what remained.
Most people rank foreign crises far below domestic concerns – health care, jobs and the cost of living – and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has reached directly into people’s pockets through the price of petrol. Gaza, for most, never did.
A year ago, I warned that once the mass violence in Gaza ended, international attention would wane, making it easier for either side to derail the peace process. That is largely what happened, but not entirely.
What stands out about the past year is less the weakening of attention to Gaza than the extent to which some of it remained. While mass opinion largely moved on, elite opinion (some legislators, officials, commentators) and the smaller but highly committed body of concerned global citizens did not.
The latter drew on a Palestinian solidarity movement built over decades, turning outrage into a sustained global campaign – though some of their rhetoric and tactics also deepened polarisation, at home and in Israel.
Sudan, meanwhile, which the UN has described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, shows the flip side. With no equivalent global campaign behind it, it has struggled to hold the world’s gaze.
The invisibility of one crisis and the hyper-visibility of another are two faces of the same problem: which atrocities galvanise public opinion depends less on their severity than on who is organised enough to make us pay attention.
A deepening crisis in the West Bank
The sustained, if narrower, global pressure campaign on Gaza soon had a new source of outrage: settler violence in the West Bank.
The United Nations had recorded an average of six settler attacks on Palestinians a day by June of this year, a pace higher than any year on record. By July, killings linked to settler attacks had exceeded the total for all of 2025. Thousands of Palestinians have also been displaced as settlement expansion has accelerated.
Some European governments had already banned trade with the settlements; others, such as the United Kingdom, more recently found they could no longer afford to ignore the crisis. In September, London announced its ban, with Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband accusing “settler terrorists” of ethnic cleansing.
Although the European Union is Israel’s largest trading partner and the UK another important one, the economic impact of these measures will be modest since settlements export relatively little. The significance is mainly political.
Moreover, if the European pressure is meant in part to sway Israeli voters before the election, it’s unclear how effective it will be. Outside pressure before an election tends to rally a leader’s loyal base, and the global outrage over Gaza has already reinforced a siege mentality among many Israeli Jews.
The real external pressure, however, will need to come after the election.
The decisive stick for moving the peace process forward lies in Washington, given how much any Israeli government depends on US support. The main carrot for Israel would be normalisation of relations with Saudi Arabia – and with it much of the Arab and Muslim world. But this is a reward Riyadh has tied to a credible path to Palestinian statehood.
Another factor will weigh even more, and it is often underestimated: the Israeli public’s profound need for a sense of security.
Shattered on October 7, this need helps explain how the war in Gaza was fought, though it cannot excuse it – just as no grievance, whatever its roots, could justify Hamas’ massacre of civilians.
It will now shape how Israelis vote – and what any new government believes it can risk – far more than sticks or carrots from abroad.
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The harder test: shades of grey
Last year, I argued that meaningful progress in Gaza and the West Bank would require an Israeli government willing to make hard choices.
The October 27 election will be a test of whether one emerges. Polls suggest Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar could become the largest party in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), but it may struggle to form a governing coalition without the support of Arab-Israeli parties, a prospect Eisenkot has refused to embrace.
A change of government would matter. It could bring a real effort to rein in settler violence, a more cooperative approach to the Board of Peace’s efforts in Gaza, and a state inquiry into the October 7 attacks.
However, it is less likely to bring a fundamental change in policy on Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. Eisenkot has ruled out a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future, and any coalition he leads would probably include right-wing partners.
Herein lies a paradox. Global action is most easily mobilised against clearly villainous actions and actors. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current coalition, including far-right ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has made the case for international pressure easy.
A more moderate-sounding, centre-right government would make it much harder to sustain. Governments that could not ignore Israel’s conduct under Netanyahu may ease off their pressure. Some media may treat an Eisenkot-led victory as a path towards resolution, and concerned citizens may struggle to keep people’s attention focused on an occupation that grinds on more quietly.
If sustained attention depends on extreme cases, then the quieter periods in between are where policies stall and abuses continue. The past year suggests that outrage alone cannot carry meaningful pressure through those periods.
Three years after October 7, the guns in Gaza are quieter, but far from silent. The question for the year ahead is whether the world keeps listening.
Eyal Mayroz served as a counterterrorism specialist with the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1980s.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/05/three-years-after-october-7-global-attention-on-gaza-has-receded-the-real-test-will-come-after-israels-election/