As many Palestinians and Israelis celebrate the ceasefire in Gaza and the hostages-prisoners exchange, human rights activists and organisations are asking: what now?
Can a ceasefire agreement lead to lasting peace accords and to a long-awaited Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem? If efforts to rebuild and rehabilitate Gaza begin, what will happen in the rest of Palestine?
In a recent panel about the genocide in Gaza, the executive director of B’Tselem, Yuli Novak, raised concerns about the West Bank, where Israeli settlements are rapidly expanding. According to Novak, there is no international monitoring body working in the region that could prevent Israel from maintaining its’ warfare in the West Bank.
During the past two years, the situation in the West Bank had escalated. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) raided refugee camps, while activists accuse Israeli authorities of supporting settlers’ violence.
On September 3, 2025, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister and head of the settlement administration, presented a plan to annex the West Bank and declared that “enemies of the state [Palestinians] should not live a comfortable life (…) Our slogan: maximum territory, minimum population.”
B’Tselem reports that approximately 40 entire communities, homes to more than 2,000 people, have been expelled in the West Bank since 7 October, 2023. Furthermore, they report that besides state-ordered demolitions, many communities choose to leave due to increased settlers’ violence.
A key case of displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank is that of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages on the outskirts of Yatta city, south of Hebron. The area had made headlines earlier this year when local filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal won the Academy Award for best documentary (along with Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor).
Throughout the years, dozens of communities in Masafer have been facing displacement and demolition. In May 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled against the residents of Masafer Yatta and declared the area a military firing zone 918, which legalised the procedure of further actions against these communities.
Therefore, student life for young Palestinians in Masafer Yatta is as different as it can be from students’ lives here in Manchester.
Ahmad Nasr Nawajaa, a young Palestinian student from Susya in Masafer, has been sharing his village’s story on social media (@ahmad_susya) and in rallies around the world.
Despite being recently accepted into an American college, Nasr Nawajaa was unable to attend due, to his claims, of visa refusal by the U.S. government. Instead, Nasr Nawajaa enrolled in Birzeit University, near Ramallah. In an interview I held with him online, he described his life as a student from Susya:
“I grew up in a very small village threatened with demolition by the occupation, but it existed before [Israel] came to it. I grew up and studied in a school that was also threatened with demolition at any time. I used to walk to this school despite the suffering and obstacles that the settlers and the army caused. We were determined to learn.”
“The war had a huge impact on Susya […] In the first months of the war, they closed off the entire area and closed the roads. They did not allow anyone to enter or leave, and they knew that there were civilians inside this village. They destroyed many of the crops and water wells.”
Nasr Nawajaa graduated from high school during the war in Gaza, and the celebrations of his achievements were “not complete.”
“I graduated despite the obstacles that the occupation placed on us as students […] [but] my colleagues in Gaza did not graduate, and they also had dreams like me.”
Birzeit University has been a target of several IDF operations, which ended with the arrests of students and professors alike.
Nasr Nawajaa explains that “Birzeit University is considered one of the best universities in Palestine […] where there is freedom to express one’s opinion […] so [the] army stormed it and arrested students who talked about the occupation inside the university.”
Nasr Nawajaa urges students around the world to remember their Palestinian colleagues: “We are students like you, we want to learn and we want to be better than [we were] yesterday.”
World leaders’ historic recognition of Palestine, along with the recent ceasefire deal, raises hopes mixed with concerns for the Middle East.
Rula Hardal, a Palestinian activist and co-director of A Land For All, sees the timing of the ceasefire agreement as a result of the wave in international recognition of Palestine, and speculates that it aims to navigate the discourse away from a Palestinian state.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are inherently tied to each other. Even if a ceasefire deal in Gaza had been reached, the momentum built in civil protests around the world should not stop.
As Nasr Nawajaa says, “Do not forget Palestine and the students of Palestine. Even if there is a ceasefire [in Gaza], there is also aggression in the West Bank.”
