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
by Jonathan Cook / October 17th, 2025
[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.
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 it does? 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.
If Israel were 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 “stabilization 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 stabilization 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 the West Bank will not be one 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 have ever resigned themselves to permanent servitude and oppression. The Palestinians will prove no different.
From Sabra and Shatila to Gaza: The Vicious Cycle of US-Israeli ‘Peace’ Ploys
by Ramzy Baroud | Oct 15, 2025 |
The history of Zionism is fundamentally one of deception. This assertion is critically relevant today, as it contextualizes the so-called ‘Trump Gaza proposal,’ which appears to be little more than a veiled strategy to defeat the Palestinians and facilitate the ethnic cleansing of a significant portion of Gaza’s population.
Since the start of the current conflict, the United States has been Israel’s staunchest ally, going as far as framing the outright slaughter of Palestinian civilians as Israel’s “right to defend itself.” This position is defined by the wholesale criminalization of all Palestinians – civilians and combatants, women, children, and men alike.
Any naive hope that the Trump administration might restrain Israel proved unfounded. Both the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and the Republican administration of his successor have been enthusiastic partners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s messianic mission. The difference has been primarily rhetorical. While Biden wraps his staunch support in liberal discourse, Trump is more direct, using the language of overt threats.
Both administrations pursued strategies to hand Netanyahu a victory, even when his war failed to achieve its strategic objectives. Biden used his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, as an emissary to broker a ceasefire fully tailored to Israeli priorities. Similarly, Trump utilized his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others, to concoct a parallel ploy.
Netanyahu deftly exploited both administrations. The Trump era, however, saw the US lobby and Israel seemingly dictating American foreign policy. A clear sign of this dynamic was the famous scene last April, during Netanyahu’s White House visit, when the ‘America First’ President pulled out a chair for him. The summoning of Blair, who once headed the US-controlled Quartet for Peace, to the White House alongside Kushner in August, was another foreboding signal. It was evident that Israel and the US were planning a much larger scheme: one not only to crush Gaza but to prevent any attempt at resurrecting the Palestinian cause altogether.
While ten countries were declaring recognition of the state of Palestine to applause at the UN General Assembly between September 21 and 23, the US and Israel were preparing to reveal their grand strategy, with critical contributions from Ron Dermer, then Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs.
The Trump Gaza proposal was announced on September 29. Almost immediately, several countries, including strong supporters of Palestine, declared their backing. This support was given without realizing that the latest iteration of the plan was substantially altered from what had been discussed between Trump and representatives of the Arab and Muslim world in New York on September 24.
Trump announced that the proposal was accepted by Israel and threatened Hamas that, if it does not accept it within “three or four days”, then “ it’s going to be a very sad end.” Still, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who, along with the UN, has largely failed to hold Israel accountable, declared his support for the Trump proposal, stating that “it is now crucial that all parties commit to an agreement and its implementation.”
Netanyahu felt a newfound elation, believing the weight of international pressure was finally lifting, and the onus was shifting to the Palestinians. He reportedly said that “now the whole world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the conditions.” Comfortable that the pendulum had swung in his favor, he openly restated his objectives in Gaza on September 30: “To release all our hostages, both the living and the deceased, while the IDF remains in most of the Strip.” Even when Arab and Muslim nations protested the amendments to the initial Trump plan, neither Netanyahu nor Trump relented, the former continuing the massacres, while the latter repeating his threats.
The implication is stark: regardless of the Palestinian position, Israel will continue to push for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip using both military and non-military means. The plan envisions Gaza and the West Bank being administered as two separate entities, with the Strip falling under the direct control of Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, thus effectively turning Blair and Kushner into the new colonial rulers of Palestine.
History is most critical here, particularly the history of Israeli deception. From its onset, Zionist colonialism justified its rule over Palestine based on a series of fabrications: that European settlers held essential historical links to the land; the erroneous claim that Palestine was a “land without a people”; the assertion that indigenous natives were intruders; and the stereotype that Arabs are inherently anti-Semitic. Consequently, the state of Israel, built on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land, was falsely marketed as a ‘beacon’ of peace and democracy.
This web of falsehoods deepened and became more accentuated after every massacre and war. When Israel faltered in managing its military efforts or its propaganda war, the United States invariably intervened. A prime example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, where a ‘peace deal’ was imposed on the PLO under US pressure. Thanks to US envoy Philip Habib’s efforts, Palestinian fighters left Beirut for exile, on the understanding that this step would spare thousands of civilian lives. Tragically, the opposite occurred, directly paving the way for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a prolonged Israeli occupation of Lebanon until 2000.
This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza today, though the options are now more stark. Palestinians face a choice between the guaranteed defeat of Gaza – accompanied by a non-guaranteed, temporary slowdown of the genocide – and the continuation of mass slaughter. Unlike the Israeli deception in Lebanon four decades ago, however, Netanyahu makes no effort to mask his vile intentions this time. Will the world allow him to gt away with this deception and genocide?Share
