Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
Mediators announced on Wednesday that Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which consists of a six-week initial phase, and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The final details of the deal are still undergoing negotiation, and the Israeli government must still ratify the agreement. If the agreement holds, it would be a welcome respite. “A ceasefire is long overdue,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Too many children have been killed or lost loved ones in a tragic start to the new year.” But while it’s tempting to succumb to euphoria after 15 months of endless bloodshed and heartless brutality, we must maintain a sense of sobriety and admit that a ceasefire alone does nothing to remedy Israel’s gross violations of human rights and international law, which will continue to perpetuate genocide through starvation and public health crisis, even if the bombs are no longer falling.
With the brutal blockade of Gaza still in place, the ceasefire deal will not bring an end to the genocide — the blockade in itself constitutes an act of genocide, to cite former International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. Ocampo was referring to Israeli forces impeding access to food, water, fuel, medical supplies, and other essentials in Gaza for nearly two decades, which is considered an act of genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israel’s genocidal tactics in Gaza stretch back well before October 2023. Starting in 2006, in what amounted to a collective punishment of a civilian population, Israel imposed a stringent blockade on Gaza, during which it regulated food imports into the besieged strip in accordance with calories consumed per person, to limit the transfers of food and medicine to a “humanitarian minimum,” or “to put the Palestinians on a diet,” as Israeli officials mused then. To tighten the siege, Israel set up a wide buffer zone inside Gaza, which impeded the flow of goods, imposed stifling restrictions on the movements of people, and led to forced displacements and separation of families. As a result, thousands of Palestinians perished under siege. For example, between 2008 and 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded that at least 839 Palestinians had died while waiting for medical permits to leave Gaza for urgent medical treatment.
From the international justice perspective, these deprivations are considered genocidal. Reviewing the Srebrenica case, the International Court of Justice ruled that “deprivation of food, medical care, shelter or clothing” constitute a genocide. Or as Ocampo sums it up: “Starvation is the invisible Genocide weapon.” Imposing this state of deprivation also constitutes an act of aggression. According to international law, imposing a blockade is an act of war.
Even before 2023, the siege had rendered Gaza a living hell. In 2018, five years before Israel’s genocidal war, the UN concluded that Gaza was “unlivable.” Come October 2023, Gaza was already looking into the abyss. That means no ceasefire can hold without lifting the suffocating siege and ending Israel’s yearslong blockade of Gaza, which is both inhumane and unlawful. The United Nations still considers Israel an occupying power in Gaza, because Israel still controls Gaza by land, air and sea. And this will continue to be the case even once the recently announced ceasefire deal takes effect. Gaza itself is a colossal refugee camp created by Israel in the wake of the Nakba.
While a ceasefire would stop the most immediate forms of bloodshed and offer a fleeting relief, it would not end Gaza’s miseries. It would lay bare the total destruction that Israel has wrought on the besieged strip. According to a UN report, it could take 350 years for Gaza to rebuild if it remains under a blockade. Just cleaning Gaza’s rubble could take 15 years, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), not to mention thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance that remains scattered across the Strip. It will take Gaza generations to heal, with over 50,000 dead, 100,000 maimed, 2 million displaced, over 20,000 children lost or missing under rubble and thousands more orphaned.
More appalling still is Israel’s ongoing assault on UNRWA, which “amounts to criminalization of humanitarian aid,” according to Amnesty International. In October 2024, Israeli legislators passed two bills that ban UNRWA from operating in Gaza and the West Bank. The ban is set to take effect in two weeks. If implemented as planned, the UNRWA ban will impede immediate relief efforts and food distribution in the besieged strip.
UNRWA has been the backbone of humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza during the yearlong genocide, providing two-thirds of all primary health care, food to half the population, one-third of the polio vaccinators operating there, education and psychosocial support to nearly 1 million people (including over half a million children), and emergency shelter to nearly 2 million displaced people. UN officials have warned that Israel’s expulsion of UNRWA will hasten the collapse of social order in the ravaged enclave, where Israeli lawmakers have seemed intent to “purge northern Gaza of residents by use of sieges, infrastructure destruction, and the destruction of the last sources of water, food, and energy in northern Gaza,” as Haaretz reported.
Gaza as we know it no longer exists, and when Israeli leaders and generals boast of having bombed Gaza “back to the Stone Age,” they are not speaking in metaphorical terms. Israel has destroyed Gaza for generations to come and rendered it “totally and completely uninhabitable.” Many displaced Palestinians do not know if their homes are still standing or buried under rubble.
And yet, the deal does not mention reparations for Palestinians who have lost their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, mosques, universities, libraries and museums. It does not mention reparations for those whose water wells, grain mills and agricultural land have been destroyed and poisoned, or for those whose entire urban infrastructure has been wiped out. (In a year’s span, Israel has dropped well over 85,000 metric tons of mostly U.S.-made bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs.) The ceasefire deal is really more of a hostage deal. In exchange for nearly 100 Israeli hostages, 3,000 Palestinian prisoners will be released in stages — only a fraction of the over 10,000 prisoners held in Israeli torture camps in deplorable conditions, most of whom have been forcibly kidnapped from Gaza since October 2023, according to the Commission of Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.
This is a fragile deal, elusive and negotiated in bad faith. Calling it a “ceasefire” is greatly misleading. It’s nothing but a pause in genocide to allow the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. It’s by no means permanent, merely a temporary “pause in fighting,” with no guarantees that Israel will even adhere to it, especially since Israeli negotiators have insisted on keeping troops in Gaza, while Israeli forces have continually violated a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon over 100 times. Israel’s long history of violating ceasefire agreements in Gaza is well-documented, generating justifiable concern over whether Israel will soon resume its ethnic cleansing of Gaza after the hostages are released. Netanyahu’s last-minute attempt to delay the ceasefire vote and sabotage the deal has spurred fears of potential genocidal concessions to his extremist government. Israel has massacred at least 87 Palestinians in Gaza since the deal was announced.
Displaced Palestinians wishing to return to their homes in the north may also face the deadly prospect of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers. In late November 2023, two months into the Gaza genocide, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary ceasefire agreement; on its first day, the Israeli military opened fire on hundreds of Palestinians attempting to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
A ceasefire does not absolve Israeli leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The war criminals who have committed this genocide must be brought to justice. Nor does it absolve Joe Biden, whose administration has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal machine to the hilt for over a year, while refusing to rein in Israel’s atrocities or force it to stop the bloodshed.
The grim reality of Israeli occupation has been a constant in Gaza, regardless of headlines about ceasefires signed and breached. When you imprison 2 million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, with no way in or out, with drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, with constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives and an all-around sense of living in hell, a peace deal that glosses over these injustices will not hold.
The Gaza genocide is far from over.
We must keep talking about Gaza, keep alive our solidarity, and not allow the ceasefire to divert our attention from the ongoing struggle to end the occupation — an injustice that runs deeper than the recent military onslaught.
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