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A CEASE-FIRE IN GAZA IS FAR FROM ENOUGH  
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Seraj Assi
January 15, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ The announcement of a cease-fire deal in Gaza is a welcome reprieve
after over a year of genocide. But it does nothing to remedy
Israel’s numerous violations of international law that produced
untold misery among Palestinians. _

A Palestinian man reacts at the site of Israeli strikes that hit a
residential building and destroyed shops at Gaza's Old City market in
Gaza City., REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

 

With a cease-fire deal in Gaza now formally approved by both sides,
it’s tempting to give in to a sense of euphoria after so much
heartless brutality since October 7, 2023. But we should maintain a
sense of sobriety. According to Reuters
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“The deal outlines a six-week initial ceasefire phase and includes
the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of
hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by
Israel.”

But with the brutal blockade of Gaza still in place, it will not bring
an end to the genocide. The blockade in itself constitutes
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act of genocide, to cite former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno
Ocampo. According to international law,
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a blockade is an act of war. That means no cease-fire 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
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an occupying power in Gaza, because Israel still controls Gaza by
land, air, and sea.

In fact, the deal itself allows Israel to solidify its military
occupation of Gaza, thus catering to Israel’s insistence that it
should maintain a permanent military presence in Gaza. That includes a
vital strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt, along with
the Netzarim Corridor
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an occupation zone built by Israel to divide Gaza into a northern and
southern region, coupled with Israel’s military control over an
expanded “buffer zone,”
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is built on the ruins of demolished Palestinian homes and displaced
families along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders with Israel and
cuts deep into Gaza’s small territory, thus rendering Gaza an
ever-shrinking ghetto swollen with refugees.

As CNN reported
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citing Palestinian officials, “Under the latest proposals, Israeli
forces would maintain a presence along the Philadelphi Corridor — a
narrow strip of land along the Egypt-Gaza border — during the first
phase of the agreement.” The corridor
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was Gaza’s only bridge to the outside world.

What’s more, “Israel would also maintain a buffer zone inside Gaza
along the border with Israel without specifying how wide that zone
would be.” In other words, Israel is demanding
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control over the two strategic corridors in Gaza — a demand that has
undermined previous cease-fire talks. And while “the residents of
northern Gaza would be allowed to return freely to the north of the
strip . . . there would be unspecified ‘security arrangements’ in
place.” This could prove deadly to displaced Palestinians who wish
to return to their homes in the north. In late November 2023, two
months into the Gaza genocide, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary
cease-fire agreement; on its first day, the IDF opened fire on
hundreds of Palestinians attempting to return to their homes in
northern Gaza.

While a cease-fire might stop the worst of the bloodshed, it will not
end Gaza’s miseries. It will lay bare the total destruction that
Israel has wrought on the besieged strip. According to a UN report,
it could take 350 years
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Gaza to rebuild if it remains under a blockade. Just cleaning Gaza’s
rubble could take fifteen
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according to UNRWA, not to mention thousands of tons
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unexploded ordnance that remains scattered across the Strip.
Israel’s ongoing assault on UNRWA would even impede immediate relief
efforts.

Gaza as we know it no longer exists. 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
unhabitable [[link removed]].”

And yet the deal does not mention reparations for Palestinians who
have lost their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, mosques, water
wells, and grain mills and whose entire urban infrastructure has been
wiped out. (In a year’s span, Israel has dropped over eight-five
thousand tons of massive US-made bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of
multiple nuclear bombs.) It’s more of a hostage deal. In exchange of
nearly one hundred Israeli hostages, only three thousand Palestinian
prisoners will be released
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in stages, out of over ten thousand prisoners held in Israel torture
camps in deplorable conditions — most of whom have been forcibly
kidnapped from Gaza since October 2023, according
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the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the
Palestinian Prisoners Society.

This is a deplorable deal, negotiated in bad faith. Calling it a
“cease-fire” is misleading
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It’s 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 would even adhere to the
deal, especially since Israeli negotiators have insisted on keeping
troops in Gaza as Israeli forces have continually violated
a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon
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one hundred times. (Israel’s long history of violating cease-fire
agreements in Gaza is well documented
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Netanyahu himself has made clear his intentions on several occasions.
As the _New York Times_ reported
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Netanyahu wants a “partial” deal that would secure the release of
hostages while allowing Israel to resume the war afterward. While
Hamas negotiators have constantly demanded a permanent cease-fire,
Israeli leaders have insisted that any deal should allow the Israeli
military to continue their onslaught and occupation in Gaza, with
Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, vowing
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Monday to carry on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza: “Now is the time to
continue with all our might, to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip,
to finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas, and to open
the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all
the hostages are returned.”

Releasing the hostages, of course, has never been an Israeli priority.
Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has
tirelessly boasted
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a hostage deal “time and time again.” Netanyahu himself has
consistently sabotaged cease-fire talks to save his political career.
And even as it negotiated, Israel continued to massacre Palestinians
in Gaza with intensified brutality and impunity, killing
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least sixty-two Palestinians in twenty-four hours, including an entire
Palestinian family of three generations.

US president Joe Biden has conceded that the deal is nothing but a
“halt in fighting” aimed at the release of Israeli hostages. In a
speech on Monday, Biden parroted platitudes about Israel’s security
while paying lip service to “humanitarian assistance” for
Palestinians. “The deal we have structured would free the hostages,
halt the fighting, provide security to Israel, and allow us to
significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians who
suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started. They have been
through hell,” Biden said.

But Gaza’s hell has been Biden’s own making. It’s tragic that
the cease-fire deal — which has reached a breakthrough thanks,
ironically, to Donald Trump
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pressure on Netanyahu, or perhaps as Netanyahu’s gift to the
incoming president — is pretty much the same agreement
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Hamas accepted and Israel rejected six months ago, before tens of
thousands more Palestinians were massacred in Gaza.

A cease-fire should not absolve Israeli leaders of war crimes and
crimes against humanity. Nor should 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 should explain why countless
cease-fires of recent decades have been breached in Gaza, culminating
in an endless cycle of bloodshed. When you imprison two million people
in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end
in sight, no way in or out, drones and rockets buzzing overhead night
and day, under 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 addresses none of these concerns will not
hold.

The Gaza genocide is a particularly ugly incarnation of Israel’s
violent settler colonialism in Palestine, the tragic fruit of decades
of occupation and oppression of a stateless people deprived of basic
rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the
siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence
will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years
to come.

_Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the
author, most recently, of My Life As An Alien (Tartarus Press)._

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Ceasefire
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* Palestinians
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* Genocide
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* Reconstruction of Gaza
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