On the anniversary, more bombs: Gaza buries its dead under a ceasefire that never held

The explosions could be heard from the mourning. As Israelis gathered on Wednesday to mark three years since the 7 October attacks, Israeli aircraft struck Beit Lahia in northern Gaza and Khan Younis in the south, killing at least two Palestinians and wounding others, medics in Gaza said. The military said it had hit a militant target in Beit Lahia and offered no immediate account of the southern strike. For families in tents and ruined blocks, the anniversary changed nothing about the sound overhead.

The numbers have long since lost their power to shock, which is itself a measure of the catastrophe. Palestinian authorities put the death toll in Gaza at more than 74,000 over three years of war. Since a United States-brokered ceasefire was declared last October, Gaza health officials count at least 1,400 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire. In the same period, Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed by militants in Gaza. The United Nations says nearly all of Gaza's 2.1 million people have been displaced, much of the territory lies in ruins, and the enclave now has the highest proportion of child amputees in the world.

Each side accuses the other of hollowing out the truce. Israel says Hamas has been rearming and launching attacks in violation of the agreement, and has stepped up strikes in recent weeks. Hamas denies rebuilding its arsenal or trying to carry out attacks, and accuses Israel of undermining the deal. The ceasefire was meant to lead, eventually, to reconstruction, a Hamas disarmament and an Israeli troop withdrawal. Little progress has been made on any of them. What has been built instead is a permanent interim: a strip divided, a population camped among its own destroyed homes, and a death toll that still climbs by ones and twos on days the world calls quiet.

In Deir al-Balah, a mother of five displaced from Gaza City described a family scattered by the war: a son who left Gaza, another in a separate tent, daughters gone with their husbands to other parts of the strip, meetings now rare. Her account is ordinary, which is the point. Three years after the Hamas-led attacks killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages, and three years into the assault that followed, grief in Gaza is not an anniversary event. It is the daily condition.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said nothing could justify the atrocities of 7 October, and recalled the untold suffering inflicted on Palestinians in the hostilities that followed, calling for their suffering to end now. In Gaza, that end remains a diplomatic phrase. On the ground, the war continues at the pace of the next strike, counted not in offensives but in names read out at overwhelmed clinics.