GAZA
On the Ceasefire of January 15, 2025
A boy sits on a mattress in the courtyard where displaced persons have taken shelter in the State of Palestine. Photo: UNICEF/UNI463117/El Baba.
The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network and its international counterparts embrace the ceasefire agreed upon on January 15, 2025, with hearts both heavy and hopeful. In Gaza, amidst the rubble and unimaginable loss, our people are rejoicing. Their joy is a testament to the indomitable spirit of survival and hope. Yet, we know too well that this ceasefire, like those before it, is fragile. Israel’s repeated violations of past agreements leave us wary, and even if the bombings cease, the siege remains—a suffocating blockade that denies Palestinians the most basic means to rebuild their lives. We recall Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah’s statement that even post-ceasefire, “Israel and Western governments … will try to continue the genocide … The destruction of the physical, biological, and social in Gaza has created a biosphere capable of self-sustaining the genocidal erasure through disease and injury…”
As we witness this moment of relief, we grieve deeply for the martyrs. Their lives—80 martyred yesterday, January 15, 2025, journalists assassinated for their bravery, and countless others erased by the carnage—are stark reminders of an unyielding genocide. The world must understand: this genocide did not begin on October 7, 2023. For over a century, Palestinians have been subjected to a relentless system of erasure.
It is a genocide that seeks to obliterate memory, as Israel wages memoricide, rewriting history to deny our existence. It is a genocide that seeks to annihilate our present, with bombings, imprisonments, and a deliberate strategy to make life unlivable. And most heartbreakingly, it is a genocide that targets our future—our children.
The testimonies from doctors returning from Gaza are seared into our minds: children shot in the head and chest, clear evidence of a shoot-to-kill policy. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the murder of Palestinian children has tripled. The Knesset has even passed laws sentencing children as young as 12 to life imprisonment. These are not isolated incidents; they are calculated acts of brutality. Palestinian children remain the only children in the world subjected to prosecution in military courts—robbed of their innocence, their rights, and their futures.
The violence is not limited to Gaza. Across Palestine—in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem—settlers terrorize our communities daily, emboldened by a system that shields them from accountability. The siege of Gaza, the theft of land, the destruction of homes, the targeting of children—these are all parts of the same machinery of oppression, designed to erase our people from history, from their land, and from existence itself.
To our supporters and all who stand for justice and humanity, we urge you to take action. Keep raising your voice for an arms embargo on Israel. Continue to support the Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
Join the No Child A Target campaign and help us reach one million signatures on our petition. Over half a million people have already signed—add your voice to demand an end to the violence against Palestinian children.
We also encourage you to write to U.S. policymakers through the No Child A Target letter campaign. (Go to No Child A Target letter campaign. If a pop-up message appears, close it to access the campaign). Let them know the world is watching, and we will not remain silent.
Palestinian children deserve to grow up with laughter instead of tears, with dreams instead of nightmares, with freedom instead of fear. They deserve a future. We owe it to them, to the martyrs, and to generations yet to come to fight for justice, for accountability, and for liberation.
Let us honor those we have lost by demanding a better world for those who remain. Let us stand together, unshaken and unyielding, in the struggle for Palestinian freedom.
Signed,
The Palestine Mental Health Networks
Reaching Ceasefire in Gaza: A Tale of Trump’s Illusion and Biden’s Failure
Tahir Osman.
President Joe Biden, flanked by his Secretary of State and Vice President, announced the ceasefire in Gaza with an air of accomplishment, framing it as a crowning achievement of his administration’s diplomatic efforts. However, this assertion is profoundly misleading. While the ceasefire was presented as a diplomatic victory, the truth reveals a far darker reality. For many, the Biden administration will not be remembered for brokering peace but for enabling and facilitating policies that allowed Israel’s genocide to continue unabated.
Far from legacy of peace, the Biden administration, through its supply of the tool of genocide and to shield Israeli war crimes from international accountability, bears direct responsibility in the Israeli carnage. In announcing the ceasefire deal, President Biden claimed it was the result of eight months of diligent diplomatic efforts by his administration. In fact, it was eighth months of normalizing Israeli war crimes as self-defense. Under the leadership of America’s most Israel-first Secretary of State, the ceasefire is a symbolic gesture that conceals the deeper moral and political failings of an administration that has proven servile to Israel.
This failure is also an emblematic of a broader issue within U.S. foreign policy: prioritizing parochial or political expediency over moral and ethical imperatives. By allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to act with impunity, President Biden not only compromised America’s standing in the world but also perpetuated, unchecked, Israeli genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the administration became a complicit partner in war crimes, further undermining the United States supposed standing as a defender of human rights and international law.
President Biden and Secretary Anthony Blinken’s legacy will be marked not by a ceasefire but by their role in providing and enabling Israel to drop 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza—an amount that surpasses the combined bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II. Their tenure will be remembered for presiding over murdering or injuring 10% of Gaza’s population and the destruction of 86% of all building structures.
When students in Gaza eventually return to school after 15 months of devastation, they will face the grim effect of what the American-made bombs have wrought: 123 universities and schools reduced to rubble, murdering 750 academics and the loss of 130 scholars and university professors who once inspired hope and knowledge.
As aid trucks will be allowed to slowly roll into Gaza, the people will not forget the 300 humanitarian workers deliberately killed by Israel, nor the 160 journalists and media workers who risked—and lost—their lives attempting to broadcast the cries of a besieged population, only to have their voices fall on deaf ears and a world of dead conscious.
Amid the ruins of over 654 healthcare facilities, the memory of 1,000 selfless healthcare workers and some of Palestine’s finest medical doctors who perished in their efforts to save lives will remain seared into the collective consciousness. For the people of Gaza, this is not just a story of destruction but a testament to the world’s indifference and complicity in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable scale.
The current ceasefire agreement could have been secured months earlier. In May, President Biden proposed a similar framework that the Palestinians accepted. However, Netanyahu rejected it as a as “nonstarter,” prioritizing his political survival over ending genocide. Instead of holding Israel accountable or insisting on compliance with international humanitarian law, the Biden administration—led by the genocide facilitator, Secretary of State Blinken—chose to appease and embolden Netanyahu in his crimes.
Meanwhile, and not to be buoyant by false optimism, it’s not far-fetched to suspect that Netanyahu’s failure, as of 01/16, to secure his cabinet’s approval for the ceasefire could be part of a typical Netanyahu strategy. A last minute attempt to exert pressure, either to undermine the agreement or ‘wordsmith’ language to change terms, such as the names of prisoners to be released, or to resume the war once he gets what he wants from the exchange. This would not be unprecedented for Netanyahu, as he counts on the docile support from Washington’s genocide enablers.
This was made all the more apparent when, on the same day Netanyahu agreed to the terms of the ceasefire, his army escalated air raids, murdering 81 civilians in eight separate massacres, capping its crimes under Biden’s granted “self-defense” genocide license
Nonetheless, ending Israel’s war of genocide offers a fleeting sense of relief after 15 months of suffering. This, however, is less of a triumph to American diplomacy and more an indictment of systemic failures in the Biden’s foreign policy. Nor should it be seen as the success Donald Trump wants to project, but a reality more rooted in the abject weakness and failure of the self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden.
In this context, Trump’s allies have opportunistically seized the moment to frame the ceasefire as a vindication of his so-called strength in foreign affairs. However, such a claim is farther from the truth. The ceasefire was not the result of decisive U.S. intervention or diplomatic maneuvers but rather an Israeli failure to subdue the steadfast resistance of the Palestinian people, despite giving Netanyahu a carte blanche for over 15 months to achieve his elusive “victory.”
To this end, the ceasefire is a stark acknowledgment of Israel’s inability to impose its will, even with the unlimited U.S. military aid and diplomatic cover. Instead of securing the domination, the resistance from Gaza underscored the resilience and determination of the Palestinian people in the face of overwhelming odds. This outcome serves as a reminder that no amount of force or repression can extinguish the fight for justice and self-determination.
Words Matter, Especially in Gaza
According to the January 8 Guardian, the New York Times refused to publish an anti-war ad from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) that referred to Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide.”
The Times followed outgoing President Joe Biden in refusing to accept the genocide label for Israel’s massive bombings in densely populated areas, the targeting of doctors and journalists, and the ethnic cleansing of Gazans through repeated evacuations, and starvation as a war weapon.
Meanwhile, Israel has increasingly justified its scorched earth devastation of the Gaza Strip as a fight against terrorists and terrorism. On college campuses. pro-Palestinian protestors have faced calls of antisemitism.
Those three oft-used words (genocide, terrorism and antisemitism) warrant examination in the context of Gaza and the U.S. What do those words mean and how are they being used?
Genocide. According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national. ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. . .”
The major humanitarian aid organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders, have in their December 2024 reports strongly accused Israel of genocide. Yet viewers of Democracy Now and readers of the print media would already have discerned ample evidence of genocide from Israel’s stated intent to starve the Palestinians in Gaza, its repeated forced evacuations, and its indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
What we see every day on Democracy Now and in other media are relentless efforts by the IDF to kill or forcibly evacuate the Palestinian population. AFSC is right to call Israel’s war on Gaza genocide. If Joe Biden disagrees, maybe it’s because he could be held complicit in Genocide under the 1948 Convention.
Terrorism. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) calls terrorism “violent or destructive acts committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.” The October 7 Hamas attacks on civilians clearly fall within that wording. So do the indiscriminate bombing and missile attacks on civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military. Like Hamas terror, state terrorism is also terrorism. It is even more dangerous because it has the state’s greater military force behind it.
To date, Israeli state terrorism has claimed the lives of almost 46,000 Gazans (mostly women and children), not including those buried in the rubble of ruined buildings, and those who have died from imposed starvation and related disease and cold weather. Israel’s “right to defend itself” cannot justify the mass killing and vast destruction it has inflicted on innocent civilians. It should not excuse war crimes and acts of terrorism.
Antisemitism. The pro-Israel lobby and some members of Congress have attacked what they call antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Indeed, they have often labeled calls for an arms embargo and chants for a ceasefire “antisemitic.” Moreover, any criticism of Israel or Zionism is deemed antisemitism by the Israel Lobby. How far those broad terms stray from the simple dictionary definition! According to Merriam-Webster’s, antisemitism is “Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews. . . .” To expand such a definition to embrace larger politically motivated term degrades an established meaning.
One more word calls for definition: complicity. According to the same dictionary cited above, complicity is “Association or participation in or as if in a wrongful act.” By repeatedly furnishing lethal arms of many types to the IDF, Biden and his associates Blinken and Austin became complicit with Netanyahu and Gallant in their genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.
As President Biden leaves office, it is important that his legacy include not only his many domestic achievements, but also his complicity in the Gaza genocide. His unconditional transfers of lethal arms enabled Netanyahu’s relentless and devastating attacks on Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip. His repeated urgings that the IDF reduce civilian casualties were ignored. U.S. arms have continued to kill and maim.
Genocide, terrorism, antisemitism and complicity: those words matter today in Gaza.
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