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A NEW DISPUTE over the next phase of Gaza’s ceasefire has put the question of Israeli withdrawal back at the centre of negotiations.

US President Donald Trump announced on 31 July that an agreement had been reached for the “complete disarmament” of Hamas, saying Israeli forces would withdraw as the process is completed. But the sequencing remains contested, with Hamas saying it will not take steps towards disarmament before an Israeli withdrawal and Israel’s fulfilment of its ceasefire commitments.

For Palestinians displaced along Gaza’s eastern edge, the disagreement has immediate consequences. Months of expanding Israeli military lines have left homes and farmland inside restricted areas — and families uncertain whether any future withdrawal will allow them to return.

Sabah Salama has been waiting for exactly that.

Three months ago, as Israeli forces pushed westward beyond the area Palestinians had come to know as the Yellow Line, the 36-year-old mother of three fled her damaged home in Wadi al-Salqa, east of Deir al-Balah. She had fled and returned repeatedly throughout the war. This time was different: the line itself had moved past her home.

When the guns briefly fell silent during the truce, she returned to her bombed home with her children and tried to rebuild a life from the rubble. Plastic sheets replaced walls. Broken concrete became shelter. A small travel bag stayed packed by the door.

“We returned on our own responsibility, and we fled on our own responsibility,” she says.

“No one told us when to leave or when it was safe to come back.”

However, in early May, Salama says members of an armed local group operating alongside Israeli forces drove through the area warning residents to evacuate, saying the army was preparing to expand the military zone further westward.

“There was nowhere else to go,” she says. “No dignified place for us to be displaced to.”

“In the past, we always came back to our destroyed home, no matter how dangerous it was,” she says. Since the beginning of May, she has not returned home.

Like thousands of families living along Gaza’s eastern edge, Um Yamen now finds herself displaced once again — not by a single air strike or evacuation order, but by the slow expansion of shifting military boundaries across the Strip.

Her family now shelters near Salah al-Din Road, the main artery dividing eastern and western Gaza, waiting for any sign that they might return.

“Even if the tanks retreat only a few metres, we will go back immediately,” she says.

For months, Palestinians had watched the military lines move westward across Gaza. On 15 May, Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the scale of that expansion, saying Israeli forces now controlled around 60% of the Strip — a statement widely seen as acknowledgement that the ceasefire boundaries had effectively collapsed.

The territorial expansion unfolded alongside an intensified Israeli assassination campaign that killed Hamas military leader Izz al-Din al-Haddad and his successor Mohammed Odeh within days of each other.

Under the ceasefire agreement that came into effect last October, Israeli forces were expected to withdraw to the so-called “Yellow Line”, a temporary military boundary separating Israeli troop positions from areas Palestinians could re-enter. The agreement also included a halt to military operations, increased humanitarian aid deliveries, prisoner exchanges and further phased Israeli withdrawals.

But rights groups and humanitarian organisations say Israel gradually treated the Yellow Line not as a temporary deployment line, but as the basis for a new security boundary inside Gaza.

According to the Israeli rights organisation Gisha, the first signs of the “Orange Line” began emerging in January 2026 as Israeli forces expanded their zone of control westward. The process accelerated in March and April through new earth barriers, military positions and updated maps distributed to humanitarian organisations.

On 8 March 2026, Israeli authorities provided aid agencies with revised maps showing an additional 11% of Gaza added to restricted military areas, effectively placing nearly two-thirds of the territory under direct or indirect Israeli control.

Hamas, in a statement, then accused Israel of using the expanding military zones to impose “new realities on the ground”, saying the widening “Orange Line” effectively undermined the October 2025 ceasefire agreement.

For many Palestinians living near Gaza’s eastern boundary areas, however, the consequences are already deeply personal.

The lines on the map have become lines that decide whether families like Um Yamen’s can ever go home again.

“We live on hope,” she says quietly. “We are not waiting for a full withdrawal. Just enough space to live.”

For Sabah, the loss is not only a destroyed house. The family’s farmland — now lying inside the expanded military zone — was their only source of income.

In November 2023, Salama lost her husband to cancer after weeks spent moving with him between hospitals and overcrowded school shelters during the war. She says the family tried repeatedly to leave Gaza for treatment, but each attempt ended with them turning back.

In his final days, he stopped sitting for long with his sons. She says he could not bear watching them realise he was dying while unable to do anything for them.

After four days searching for something, her husband could still eat, Sabah recalls; the last thing he managed to have was a piece of chocolate.

When the family fled their home again in early May, as Israeli forces expanded the military zone around Wadi al-Salqa, her sons rushed to gather their father’s clothes before anything else.

She pauses before adding:

“In the end, death is everywhere.”

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