The Ceasefire In Gaza Is Not An End

There is, at least, a pause. After 15 months of almost continuous mass slaughter, bombs, for the time being, are not being dropped on Gaza. The ever-rising official death toll has tipped past 48,000 people, nearly 18,000 of whom were children, but it will continue to grow in the coming weeks and months, as mangled bodies are pulled from the rubble. The true number will probably never be known, in part due to all those bodies that were literally evaporated in the fires of Israeli explosives. The world has made it clear there will be no accounting for them.

The injured of Gaza are said to number 111,000 or so, with close to a quarter of those, according to the World Health Organization, bearing “life-changing injuries.” Blinded eyes; charred skin; torn limbs; shattered spines. Statistics, though, will struggle to account for the trauma, born of 15 months of ceaseless psychological torture and bereavement. Do mental scars constitute “life-changing” injuries? Are ongoing mass starvation and disease noted in the stats?

There is a pause now in the genocide, but there will be no end to the violence. There will be no justice nor peace. Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing and apartheid will endure, and, at any moment, the ceasefire may break and the genocide will resume, as Israeli settler attacks backed by the army in the West Bank demonstrate. It is only a temporary pause in the war, any extensions subject to negotiation, with its first phase set to last for six weeks. Talks will be held during phase one, the outcome of which will determine if and how phase two can be implemented. Should the second phase fail to meet Israel’s standards, Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted Israel’s right to start the war up again, while phase three is, as yet, entirely vague.

The odds of the ceasefire enduring, and of its three phases being implemented, are not good. There are already reports suggesting it’s been violated, with at least four people, including a 13-year-old Palestinian child, allegedly shot by the Israeli military since it began. This would hardly be unusual for Israel, given that, as Roqayah Chamseddine reported for Splinter, it has repeatedly broken its ceasefire in Lebanon.

The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of broken ceasefires. It is all part of a cycle, where, first, Israel provokes the Palestinians into reacting with violence, which it then uses to justify its own violent escalations. It kills Palestinians indiscriminately, until, eventually, a fresh ceasefire deal is negotiated and implemented. Maybe it holds for a while, maybe it breaks quickly, but, either way, the cycle invariably begins again, without the Palestinians ever gaining respite from Israeli terror.

A return to the genocide, in reality, would probably suit Netanyahu. Along with Israel’s war in Lebanon, it has served him perfectly well up until this point, allowing him to rebuild his support among the Israeli electorate, which, in the wake of the security failures represented by October 7, had collapsed. The war also allowed him to evade justice in his corruption trial, which has been repeatedly delayed. His government coalition, filled as it is with far-right settlers, was held together on the basis of the genocide’s continuation, and, already, we have seen it weaken since the ceasefire deal was secured. Itamar Ben-Gvir, protesting the agreement, has already resigned as national security minister.

Netanyahu, hoping to hold onto his power and his freedom, may well be driven to restart the genocide, but he can’t do it alone. The war on Gaza has, from its very beginning, been a joint effort, supported and funded by the U.S. president. Genocide Joe Biden is out of office now, but his successor hardly represents hope that things might change for the better. Trump has loaded his administration with committed Israel supporters, while his radically evangelical political base supports Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing under the belief that it fulfills biblical prophecy. That’s why, following his formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel during his first administration, Trump declared, “That’s for the evangelicals.”

Despite taking credit for securing the ceasefire, Trump, immediately after his inauguration, began to cast doubt on its viability and speaks now of simply “cleaning out” Gaza of Palestinians. There is an open desire within Israeli society to settle in Gaza, which, given the ethnic cleansing and destruction that has already taken place there, seems a probable outcome. Trump, too, has already removed sanctions previously imposed upon violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It was actually Biden who introduced those sanctions, not because he is against Israeli settlements, but because he prefers a bit more subtlety about how they’re established. Trump bears no such qualms, and, as the removal of the sanctions signals, he will happily allow West Bank settlements to expand, with all the violence against Palestinians that entails.

Despite this ceasefire deal, none of this is over. Even if it holds, and the next two phases of the agreement are implemented—which is itself doubtful—war is going to break out again some day. How could it not? Israel’s aims are the same today as they were before the ceasefire. It seeks to erase Gaza and to annex the West Bank. Its leaders have told us so, but, despite all they’ve done, the Palestinians endure. So Israel will unleash yet more violence. The interminable cycle will reset, and it won’t ever stop until, somehow, Palestinians are one day free.