It was never a Gaza 'war'. The 'ceasefire' is a lie cut from the same cloth

Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is doomed. No people in history has ever resigned itself to permanent servitude and oppression. The Palestinians will prove no different

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

None of this applies in Gaza.

The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever western politicians and media wish us to believe.

Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to it blocking promised aid.

So what is really going on?

To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan“, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister.

We watched the indiscriminate slaughter of a largely civilian population, already under a 17-year siege, by Israel, a regional military goliath supported and armed by the global military goliath of the United States.

We watched the erasure of almost every home in Gaza – in what already amounted to a concentration camp for its people.

Families were forced into makeshift tents, as they had been when they were expelled decades ago at gunpoint from their lands in what is now Israel. But this time they have been exposed to a toxic brew of the rubble-dust of their former homes and the spent materials from many Hiroshimas-worth of bombs dropped on the enclave.

We watched a captive population being starved for months on end, in what amounted to, on the most generous view, an undisguised policy of collective punishment – a crime against humanity for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being pursued by the International Criminal Court.

Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have been physically damaged, in addition to their psychological trauma, by a malnourishment that has altered their DNA – damage that will most likely be passed on to future generations.

We watched Gaza’s hospitals being systematically dismantled, one by one, until the entire health sector was hollowed out, unable to deal with either the flood of wounded or the growing tide of malnourished children.

We watched large-scale ethnic cleansing operations, in which families – or what was left of them – were driven out of “kill zones” into areas Israel termed “safe zones”, only for those safe zones to quickly turn, undeclared, into new kill zones.

And as Trump stepped up the pressure for a “ceasefire”, we watched Israel unleash an orgy of violence, destroying as much of Gaza City as it could before the deadline arrived to stop.

Rhetoric of ‘Gaza war’

None of this can, or should, be described as a war.

The United Nations, every major human rights organisation in the world, including Israel’s B’Tselem, and the world’s leading body of genocide scholars agree that what has happened in Gaza meets the definition of genocide – as laid out in the UN’s Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel, the US, Britain and the European Union.

Nonetheless, Israel and the West’s rhetoric about “war” has been crucial in selling to western publics an equally dishonest rhetoric of a “ceasefire” and hopes for “peace”.

The lie of the current ceasefire is a counterpart of the lie about a “Gaza war” narrated to us over the past two years. The framing serves exactly the same purpose: to disguise Israel’s larger goals.

On Tuesday, in the midst of the “ceasefire”, as the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians were being traded, Israel was killing more Palestinians. The Financial Times was among the media outlets reporting that Israeli soldiers had killed “several” Palestinians that day.

Earlier, Israeli soldiers posted videos as they pulled out of Gaza City of their torching homes, food supplies and a vital sewage treatment plant.

In other words, Israel never had any intention of halting its fire.

This is a familiar pattern.

Israel killed at least 170 Palestinians during an earlier “ceasefire” negotiated by Trump, in January, which it then unilaterally ended weeks later so it could revive the genocide.

And in Lebanon, where a ceasefire is supposed to have been in force for the past year, overseen by the United States and France, Israel is recorded to have broken its terms more than 4,500 times.

As former British ambassador Craig Murray observed of the ceasefire period, Israel “has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon”.

Does anyone imagine Gaza, a tiny territory without an army or the trappings of statehood, will fare any better than Lebanon under an Israeli ceasefire?

Ceasefire charade

The ceasefire may be a temporary lull in Israel’s genocidal, two-year assault on Gaza but it does nothing to cease Israel’s decade-long occupation of the Palestinian territories – the inciting cause of the “war”.

The occupation continues.

It also does nothing to cease Israel’s system of apartheid rule over Palestinians, judged illegal by the world’s highest court last year.

Then, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and that other states pressure it into such a withdrawal.

The UN General Assembly gave Israel till last month to honour the ICJ’s ruling. Israel has not just ignored that deadline. Even during the current “ceasefire”, Israeli soldiers continue to be directly stationed in more than half of Gaza.

Additionally, of course, Israel still controls all of Gaza’s territory at arm’s length through its spy drones, attack drones and fighter jets, surveillance technology, and land and naval blockades.

It should be a truism that a state bent on genocide has no reason to stop its genocide unless it is forced to do so – by a stronger party.

Trump has been striding the world stage pretending to be doing just that, strong-arming Israel and Hamas. But only the credulous – and the western political and media class – fall for this charade.

The “ceasefire” is not “fragile”. It was set up to fail, not to provide a path to peace. Its real purpose is to provide Israel with a fresh mandate to renew the genocide.

Dehumanised prisoners

For decades, Palestinians have been forced to live with a catch-22: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Any resistance to their brutal occupation results in slaughter – or “mowing the lawn”, as Israel terms it – as well as their designation as “terrorists”.

But a policy of no resistance, as pursued by Mahmoud Abbas’ compliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hangs Palestinians out to dry – living as permanent, dehumanised prisoners under Israeli rule, herded into ever shrinking reservations while Jewish militias are licensed to build settlements on their land.

The same kind of bogus “choice” is central to the current “ceasefire”.

Hamas has got a hostage swap – after thousands of Palestinians were seized off the street (and thousands more will soon be seized to replace them) – while the people of Gaza win brief respite from Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign. That was the formula for cornering Hamas into approving a ceasefire agreement it knows only too well is primed with tripwires.

The most obvious is the requirement on Hamas to return the last remaining Israelis held captive in Gaza, including 28 bodies, in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons. The agreement set a 72-hour timeframe for the exchange.

Hamas have found it harder to locate the sites of the dead. So far they have returned 10, though one appears not to be an Israeli.

The wasteland that is now Gaza has few landmarks to identify the locations of original burial sites. And the mountains of rubble under which the Israelis’ bodies lie – created by the US-supplied bunker-busting bombs Israel dropped that most likely killed them – are almost impossible to move without heavy machinery sorely lacking in Gaza.

Even if the sites can be identified and the rubble removed, Hamas may discover that the bodies no longer exist, that they have been vaporised, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in the more than half of Gaza Israel is still occupying and Hamas cannot access.

As the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ultimate neutral arbiter, has conceded, finding the bodies in these circumstances will be a “massive challenge”.

Another catch-22.

Notably, though the western media has happily amplified Israeli claims of Hamas bad faith over returning the bodies, as well as the suffering of waiting Israeli families, it has provided little comparable coverage on the condition of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel.

The refrigerated corpses arrived at Nasser hospital in Gaza without any form identification, and with staff there unable to run DNA tests because of the destruction inflicted by Israel on its facilities. Families will have no idea who their loved ones are unless they try to personally identify them.

That will be a gruesome and distressing task. Doctors noted that the returned bodies were still cuffed and blindfolded, executed with bullets to the head, and with clear signs that they had been tortured before and after their deaths.

Meanwhile, even before the 72-hour timeframe for the exchange was reached, Israel exploited the delay to renew the starvation of Gaza, restricting aid desperately needed to address the famine it had engineered.

More ominously, according to Israeli media reports, the US has agreed a “secret clause” with Israel to allow it to resume its genocidal “war” if Hamas cannot produce all the bodies within the three-day window.

Double bind

Then, if Hamas can avoid this tripwire, there is the requirement on the group to lay down its weapons. This is being presented as a pre-condition for “peace”. But the one certainty is that, even were Hamas to disarm, peace would not be the outcome.

This week, in his usual stye, Trump made undefined threats.

“If they [Hamas] don’t disarm,” he said, “we will disarm them”. He added that, if the US got involved, “it will happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”

This intentionally puts Hamas and others pursuing armed resistance against Israel’s occupation – a right recognised in international law – in a double bind.

First, a disarmed population in Gaza will be even more defenceless in the face of Israeli attacks.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of Hamas’ military strategy, it is hard to ignore the fact that the prolonged toll of fighting on Israeli troops – in terms of psychological trauma and casualty figures – has served as some sort of countervailing pressure.

Large numbers of Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza – but not, as polls show, because most care about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians there.

Rather, their protests have been driven by concerns about the plight of Israeli captives in Gaza and about the toll on Israeli soldiers.

Hamas, and many of Gaza’s population, will worry that disarmament would swing the cost-benefit analysis among Israelis even further towards continued genocide. It risks more bloodletting by Israel, not peace.

Lose-lose conundrum

Second, Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm when there are criminal clans, armed and backed by Israel, and some of them linked to Islamic State, roaming Gaza’s streets.

Palestinians have long understood that Israel’s ambition is to undermine the Palestinians’ major national liberation movements – whether Hamas or Fatah – by promoting in their place feudal warlords.

One Palestinian analyst warned me 14 years ago of the dangers of what he referred to as Israel’s plan for the “Afghanistanisation” of Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s ultimate divide-and-rule strategy would involve promoting rival clan leaders who focus on protecting their own small fiefdoms and fighting each other, rather than try to resist the illegal occupation and seek a unified Palestinian state.

At the height of the genocide, the clans proved how dangerous such a development could be for ordinary Palestinians. Aided by Israel, and with Hamas pinned down in their tunnels, these gangs looted aid trucks, stole aid from weaker families, then took that food for their own families and sold the rest at extortionate prices few could afford. Everyone else starved.

If Hamas disarms, these clans will have free rein, propped up by Israel. Neither Hamas nor most people in Gaza want to see that happen again. That is not a path to peace, but to continuing brutal Israeli occupation, subcontracted in part to local warlords.

Confusingly, Trump seems to grasp some of this. On Tuesday, he said Hamas “took out a couple of gangs that were very bad… they killed a number of gang members. That didn’t bother me much, to be honest. That’s okay.”

What then does Trump imagine will happen if Hamas lays down its arms, as he and Israel have insisted they do? Will these “very bad gangs” not re-emerge?

That is precisely the lose-lose conundrum Israel wants Hamas, and Gaza, plunged into.

Muddying the waters

On Wednesday, Trump muddied the waters again, warning that, if Hamas did not disarm, Israel would resume its attacks on Gaza “as soon as I say the word”.

The next day he went further, suggesting the US itself might act in Gaza. He wrote on his Truth Social: “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.”

So what is supposed to fill the vacuum created in the doubly improbable event of Hamas dissolving itself and Israel fully withdrawing from Gaza?

Israel has insisted on no Palestinian governance in the enclave, even from Abbas’ Vichy regime in the West Bank. Israel is also continuing to refuse to release Marwan Barghouti, the long-jailed Fatah leader who is the sole unifying figure in Palestinian politics and often referred to as the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.

Were Israel really interested in ending the occupation and in “peace”, Barghouti would be the obvious person to call on. Instead there are reports that he is, once again, being savagely beaten by Israeli prison guards, putting his life in danger.

Trump’s vision for the next few years offers only his infamous “Board of Peace“ – an unapologetically colonial-style administration expected to be headed by Viceroy Tony Blair. Two decades ago, the former British prime minister helped the US wreck Iraq, leading to the utter collapse of its institutions and mass death among its population.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” will supposedly sit nearby in Egypt, not in Gaza.

On the ground, Trump envisions a foreign “stabilisation force“. But its troops, assuming they ever appear, are likely to be no more effective at dealing with Israeli aggression than counterpart peacekeepers in Lebanon have been for decades.

Israel has repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon, while the presence of UN forces has done nothing to curb Israel’s continuing “ceasefire” violations.

A stabilisation force will be able to do little to stop Israel meddling directly in Gaza through drone assassinations; restrictions on imports of concrete, food and medical supplies; and a naval blockade of the enclave’s territorial waters.

Trump’s vision of “peace” is of Palestinians eking out a bare existence among Gaza’s ruins, at the mercy of Israel’s ever-watching drones.

Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, told the Intercept this week that what we are most likely to see over the coming weeks and months is a move by Israel from wanton genocide to what he called a more “managed genocide, a managed forcible displacement”.

Israel will now be able to sit back, obstruct the rebuilding of the enclave, sending a clear message to a destitute population that their salvation will never be found in Gaza.

The future for West Bank will not be of peace either, but of Israel intensifying the atrocities there and creating mini-Gazas out of the small city-reservations into which the Palestinians there have been progressively herded.

Palestinian resistance will not end in such circumstances. No people in history has ever resigned itself to permanent servitude and oppression. The Palestinians will prove no different.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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