The Gaza Genocide Continues, Rebranded as a 'Ceasefire'

Robin Andersen

Dalia Abu Ramadan (ScheerPost (12/5/25): "The occupation has convinced the world that the bloodshed in Gaza has stopped, while in reality families are still being erased from the civil registry in absolute silence."

Palestinian writer Dalia Abu Ramadan, who lives in Gaza, wondered in ScheerPost (12/5/25), "How can the world believe Israel’s claim that a 'ceasefire' is still in place?" 

When the "peace deal" was signed in Egypt on October 9 in front of leaders from some 30 countries, Trump repeatedly declared the "war in Gaza is over." “This took 3,000 years to get to this point. Can you believe it?” he proclaimed. “And it’s going to hold up, too. It’s going to hold up.”

The Hill (10/13/25) characterized it as “a victory lap for Trump,” who after landing in Israel also “basked in applause from Israeli lawmakers at the Knesset.” There, amid the fanfare and celebration by the families of the remaining Israeli prisoners released by Hamas, Trump blustered that the moment was a "historic dawn of a new Middle East” (CBC News, 10/13/25).

Clearly the Egyptian summit was heavy on “theatrics,” as the Arab Weekly (10/15/25) put it, saying the event seemed much more like a promotional "celebration of one man's newfound peacemaker persona than a high-level political negotiation.”

But the crafted global stagecraft had its desired effects. It successfully laid out an official playbook for establishment media to follow—and the ceasefire narrative was set firmly in place. Trump's fantasy of triumphing over 3,000 years of history helped news outlets put into the rearview mirror the two brutal years Israel spent annihilating Gaza (where the number of Palestinians killed and wounded reached over 240,000 in December 2025). International news outlets quickly picked up the assumption that Israel would stop its attacks on Palestinians.

Despite Trump’s pronouncement, a "peace" has not held, though the fantasy narrative has. This has been accomplished at first through media’s verbal strategies—some familiar, some not—and on to the use of the oldest form of censorship: simply blacking out news of Israeli attacks.

Ceasefire 'still in place' as genocide continues

When Israel acknowledged "it had opened fire on people who came near the "yellow line," NBC News (10/20/25) responded, "It was not clear exactly how aware Palestinians will have been of where that line sits"—rather than pointing out that agreement does not require Palestinians to ethnically cleanse themselves from more than half of Gaza.

As Belén Fernández (FAIR.org,  10/21/25) pointed out, within the first 10 days Israel killed at least 97 Palestinians and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire 80 times. “One might have expected," she wrote, "to see a headline or two” informing readers that “Israel Violated the Ceasefire,” but “no such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media.”

News reporting downplayed Israel’s continued killing in Gaza, while consistently asserting that Israel’s genocide had all but ended. This took considerable wordplay and astounding headlines, as when NBC (10/20/25) announced “Trump Says Gaza Ceasefire Still in Place After Israeli Strikes." Who was their source? Donald Trump.

Each side had violated the “fragile truce,” but after Israel launched the strikes, it began “renewed enforcement of the ceasefire,” a denial that sounds like a nonsense-word combination. As Fernández observed, media could not bring themselves to simply state: “If you don’t cease firing, it’s not a ceasefire.”

More than a month later, Amnesty International (11/27/25) issued a grim statement:

Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signaling any change in their intent.

According to UN data, Israel is only letting about 20% of the agreed-upon aid trucks into Gaza (Al Jazeera, 12/12/25). A humanitarian aid coordinator told Drop Site News (12/8/25) that the ceasefire was masking the “catastrophic reality” on the ground in Gaza. On Democracy Now! (12/3/25), Israeli-American human rights lawyer Sari Bashi identified the ceasefire as a “cover” for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.

Gazan medical student Mohammed Mohisen wrote on his blog (11/30/25):

In the weeks that followed the announced ceasefire, an increasingly misleading narrative began to take shape in international discourse about the Gaza Strip, one suggesting that the war had concluded, that its chapter had been closed, and that life was slowly reclaiming its natural rhythm….

Two-thirds of Gaza’s population now lives in tents. Every night, families struggle to rearrange the fragile ground beneath them before the rain arrives. The scenes of flooding that swept through their camps weeks ago have not faded from memory, and people sleep with eyes half-open, terrified that the tragedy will strike again.

FAIR found no US corporate media coverage of Amnesty's announcement of ongoing genocide. But independent outlet Drop Site News (12/1/25) quoted Amnesty reporting that Israel had killed more than 350 Palestinians, 136 of them children, since the "ceasefire" began. As Amnesty asserted: “The world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

'A fire that never stops burning'

For the New York Times (11/19/25), the ceasefire has been "punctuated" by "deadly violence."

We need only hear testimonies from Gaza to know this. Returning to the words of Dalia Abu Ramadan (ScheerPost, 12/5/25), she describes the night of November 19: “I woke in terror as the explosions shook the ground beneath my body, certain for a moment that the war had returned and the ceasefire had collapsed entirely.” Though the strikes were as far away as 5 kilometers, they were so powerful “that they felt as if they were exploding right behind me.” It was “as if the occupation wanted to remind us that the ‘ceasefire’ that the world speaks of is nothing but a thin veil pulled over a fire that never stops burning.”

But corporate media still highlight Israeli accounts, virtually ignoring what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Israel’s genocide under a new name. That night, 28 Palestinians had been killed, 17 children among them, and more than 77 others were injured in the strikes on densely populated neighborhoods. Israel claimed that they were targeting “resistance leaders.”

The New York Times (11/19/25) covered the killings while giving ample leeway for Israeli justifications and downplaying Israel's ongoing daily violations. "The six-week-old ceasefire has been pierced periodically by bursts of violence," its subhead read, amplifying the passive both-sides construction within the article: "The truce between Israel and Hamas has been punctuated by occasional eruptions of deadly violence."

Later in the article, the Times admitted that while Israel had killed more than 280 Palestinians at that point in the "ceasefire," only three Israelis (all soldiers) had been killed. The Times quoted no Palestinian civilians and offered one brief statement from Hamas.

NPR led a report (Morning Edition, 11/24/25) with, "Over the weekend, Israel and Hamas both accused each other of violating the ceasefire agreement in Gaza." On the one side, NPR's Kat Lonsdorf related, "Israel said that Hamas militants crossed the yellow line in Gaza," referring to a line that Israel—not Palestinians—had agreed to withdraw behind.  On the other side, "Israeli strikes have killed more than 300 Palestinians, including more than 60 children." NPR's summation: "Both sides have accused each other of violations, but the agreement between the two is still holding, and we've not seen a full return to war."

Moral failure

The Hollywood Reporter (12/2/25) sides with Hillary Clinton on "misinformation on social media...influencing young people’s views...when it comes to Israel and Palestine."

The incessant denial of the continuing genocide was called out at a Doha Forum on December 7, by the brave UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who stated firmly, “This is genocide,” and accused world powers and institutions of moral failure and complicity in Palestinian suffering.

This moral failure was amply illustrated by Hillary Clinton in New York City on December 3. The former US secretary of state claimed that young people were pro-Palestinian only because of the misinformation carried on social media platforms, blaming TikTok primarily, for influencing their views with “totally made up” videos.

These absurd claims got a respectful hearing in corporate media; the Hollywood Reporter (12/2/25) wrote that "Hillary Clinton is speaking up about how misinformation on social media is influencing young people’s views, specifically when it comes to Israel and Palestine." (Note: not claiming that misinformation is influencing young people, but speaking up about how it is.)

HuffPost (12/3/25) more subtly implied there was something to Clinton's thesis:

While it’s hard to parse out the impact of misinformation on public sentiment, Americans’ opinion on Israel has shown a marked shift since the nation escalated its attacks on Gaza in retaliation for the October 7 attacks.

Fox News (12/3/25) had it, "Clinton lamented that so many young Americans have been inundated with anti-Israel propaganda on the social media platform"—and repeatedly conflated "hate-filled antisemitic and anti-Israel content."

One might more realistically say that young people's exposure to corporate media, which dutifully parrot Israeli talking points while rarely citing the extensive human rights documentation, testimony and visual evidence of genocide, keeps them from being more critical of the Israeli government than they would otherwise be.

'Point of no return'

Ali Abunimah (Electronic Intifada, 11/28/25): "Mainstream US media have actually become worse over the years in their treatment of Palestine. Even as recently as 10 years ago, people like me could still appear on mainstream Western media, but especially since 7 October 2023, we’ve been almost completely shut out."

Such Clintonesque gaslighting, Trumpian statecraft and media complicity with Israel’s genocide endlessly deny what everybody can see with their own eyes and feel with our own humanity. Thus, discrediting and blocking independent reporting and social media, supplanting them with official narratives and Israeli hasbara, are essential for maintaining the genocide.

But as Ali Abunimah argued (Electronic Intifada, 11/28/25), despite the media and propaganda, changes in global public consciousness about Israel, especially among young people, “suggest we’ve reached a point of no return” for Israel. Support for the genocidal state continues to deteriorate. As elites feel they are losing their grip, they resort to ever more direct repression and censorship in an effort to shore up the status quo.

As for Donald Trump, he was so emboldened by his newfound unchallenged role as the super-Peacemaker, that on December 3 he plastered his name on the outside of the building housing the US Institute of Peace (USIP). Earlier this year, he gutted the independent agency, created by the US Congress in 1984, by blocking its federal funding.

Trump’s State Department posted on X (12/3/25), “Welcome to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace," announcing that the name change was “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” But like Israel, currently Trump stands as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, and his peace deal, is little more than a “totally made up” fiction.

Robin Andersen’s book The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza is being published by OR Books ,together with the Institute for Palestine Studies, in early 2026, and is available for pre-order.