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 it 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 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being pursued by the International Criminal Court.
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.
Hellbound and Down 