🌊 The Gaza War: The Roca Deep-Dive

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By Max Frost

We’re running a three-part series this week on the current state of the war in Gaza. Today is part one: Back to War. 

On the night of March 18, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a declaration: “From now on, negotiations will only take place under fire.”

Airstrikes proceeded to pummel the Gaza Strip, ending a two-month ceasefire and filling what remained of Gaza’s hospitals with casualties, including up to 400 fatalities (the Hamas-controlled health authority’s figure). 

This onslaught, Netanyahu said, was “just the beginning.”

In the months since, the war in Gaza has entered a new phase that shows no signs of stopping. 

On the one hand, Israel is vowing to reoccupy the Gaza Strip and eradicate Hamas regardless of the toll; on the other, Hamas continues to refuse disarmament or the release of the 58 remaining hostages, 20-23 of whom are presumed alive.

In a three-part series this week, we’re looking at why the ceasefire ended, what has happened since, and what the Palestinian people’s fate may be in Gaza.

The January–March 2025 ceasefire was born of painstaking diplomacy and desperate circumstances. Beginning on January 19, it halted months of fighting and included a series of hostage-prisoner exchanges between Israel and Hamas.

Hamas, the Islamist militant group ruling Gaza, released 33 Israeli hostages – mostly older captives and women – over several rounds, while Israel freed hundreds of Palestinian detainees in return. Critical humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza for the first time in months, and Israel’s military even began a phased pullback from parts of the enclave.

Mediators from the US, Egypt, and Qatar had crafted an ambitious three-stage deal: Eventually all hostages held by Hamas would be released, the war would formally end, and Gaza would start a years-long reconstruction. And, for a few weeks, the guns fell silent, and life-saving supplies trickled in. 

Yet even during the truce, tensions simmered. Each side accused the other of bad faith. Israel complained that Hamas was slow to provide lists of hostages for each exchange and alleged that militants violated the spirit of the deal by using released captives for propaganda. Hamas officials, in turn, charged that Israeli forces continued conducting lethal raids despite the ceasefire. On February 10, Hamas temporarily halted hostage releases, saying Israel had broken its promises; under US and Egyptian pressure, the swaps soon resumed.

By late February, however, the process hit a wall. Israel refused to release a final group of 620 Palestinian prisoners scheduled under the deal, citing “repeated violations by Hamas” during the truce. Mediators scrambled to salvage an extension of the ceasefire into a second phase, but trust between the parties was eroding.

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading, and to our new readers, thanks for joining We The 66. In this newsletter, we aim to set aside bias and fear and cut through the noise, especially on polarizing topics like this one. We hope you learned something new and look forward to sharing part two tomorrow. If you have thoughts, please reply with them here. 

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And a couple replies to yesterday’s story on US-Iran nuclear negotiations:

Greg from New Jersey wrote:

And Daniel wrote:

That’s all. We’ll be back tomorrow with part two. See you then.

–Max and Max