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

[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 its 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 the International Criminal Court is pursuing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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 organization 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 that 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 honor 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.

Dehumanized 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, dehumanized 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 a 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 has found it harder to locate the sites of the dead. So far, they have returned 10, though one appears to be non-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 vaporized, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in more than half of Gaza, which 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’s 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 of 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 identify them personally.

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 to 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 a requirement on the group to lay down its weapons. This is being presented as a precondition for “peace”. But the one certainty is that, even were Hamas to disarm, peace would not be the outcome.

This week, in his usual style, 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 recognized in international law – in a double bind.

First, a disarmed population in Gaza will be even more defenseless 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 the 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 “Afghanistanization” 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 trying 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.

The post It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.