The ceasefire announced on 10 October 2025 is in its eleventh month, and the argument about what it has achieved cannot be had honestly without the record. UNICEF's survey of Gaza between 31 May and 15 June this year found roughly one per cent of children acutely malnourished, down from a famine confirmed the previous August, and 12.2 per cent chronically malnourished. Admissions for acute malnutrition treatment fell from about 17,000 children in August 2025 to some 3,000 in March 2026. Something improved. Nothing was finished.
Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, put the limit of that improvement plainly: “Acute malnutrition can improve within weeks. The wider damage does not.” That sentence is the case for conditionality in miniature. A ceasefire that depends on continuous outside pressure to hold is not a settlement, and the states supplying the weapons are the states with the pressure to apply.
Every other recipient of Western arms operates under end-use conditions and calls it an alliance. Only here is the ordinary instrument treated as a rupture.
In Washington the instrument now has a number. H.R. 7645, the Ceasefire Compliance Act, was introduced on 23 February by Representative Sean Casten with twenty-five Democratic co-sponsors, and would bar the use of American-origin weapons in Gaza and the West Bank if Israel breaks the October 2025 ceasefire, annexes the West Bank, or fails to act against settler violence. It exempts Iron Dome, David's Sling and Arrow 3 by name. The bill has not passed. Its architecture is the argument: defence is untouched, offence is conditioned.
In London the instrument is trade. Andy Burnham's government is preparing the first substantial change in British policy in years, a ban on goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank together with sanctions on those driving settlement expansion. YouGov polling reported in August found one in two Britons in favour and sixteen per cent against. Labour Friends of Israel argue the measure would be impossible to implement. That is a serious objection about administration, and it is not an objection to the principle.
The domestic ground has moved further than the policy has. Gallup, polling 1,001 adults between 2 and 16 February, found 41 per cent of Americans sympathising more with the Palestinians against 36 per cent with the Israelis — the first time in more than two decades of asking that Israel has not led. Among 18-to-34-year-olds it was 53 to 23. Independents have joined Democrats. Republicans have not moved.
None of this is a case for withdrawal, and treating it as one is how the relationship has been made brittle. The security guarantee is real, the intelligence relationship is real, and the missile-defence systems that intercepted Iranian salvoes this spring were built together. What is at issue is whether an ally may say what every other ally is told routinely: this weapon, not for that purpose, and here is the review that follows.
The alternative is a policy defended only by insulation from argument, and those have a finite life. J Street, backing the Casten bill, wrote that “American weapons cannot be used by the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank in ways that fundamentally violate American values and directly contravene US interests.” Whether or not that language holds, the demand behind it is not going away, because the electorate making it is not going away either.
