Gaza ceasefire: Will the agony truly cease?

Every night I scroll through the timelines a little longer for the familiar faces. Shahida from Gaza, Mahmoud Abusalama, Anas, Noor. There’s the mother of five and a grandfather. But it’s been a while since I saw those two girls and their cat sitting amidst the rubble that used to be a home, school, hospital, and city. Where are they? 

On 15 January 2025, a landmark agreement was reached between Israel and Hamas, with both sides agreeing to cease hostilities and exchange Israeli hostages for prisoners from Palestine. Mainstream media would want us to believe that this agreement will bring a 15-month war, seemingly initiated by a Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, to an end. The Israel-induced Nakba in 1948, the genocide, occupation, and colonisation of Palestinians is probably a fever dream. On Wednesday, the world decided that Palestinians have suffered enough.

Today is a good time to revisit the words of Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist who wrote, "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

How right he is.

People reduced to numbers

US President Joe Biden and US President-elect Donald Trump are wrestling for spotlight and credit. Trump revealed that a deal had been reached on his Truth Social platform hours before Biden confirmed the agreement in a statement from the White House on Wednesday evening. 

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies,” Trump wrote.

Biden said he is “deeply satisfied” that this day has come, both for the sake of people in Israel with loved ones still being held captive, and those in Gaza who have suffered “unimaginable devastation.” 

More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, health officials there say, following Israel's assault on the enclave after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli claims.

The ceasefire in Gaza, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the release of all the remaining hostages held by Hamas will go into effect on 19 January, Sunday.

The ceasefire agreement mandates the release of all Israeli hostages — many believed to be deceased — from Gaza in three phases, but only a limited number of Palestinian prisoners. According to sources, 9,400 prisoners are held by Israel and 111 by Hamas. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, are imprisoned, many without charges, under the Israeli judicial system notorious for corruption and injustice. 

America’s naked self-interests

The UN's former humanitarian aid chief Martin Griffiths said, “I'm not yet convinced that the conditions are such that these essentially different positions by the two parties will be reconciled.” This implies that to Israel, this agreement is a means to secure the release of captives held in Gaza, while for Hamas it is one to secure a permanent ceasefire. “These are not the same objectives,” Griffiths said.

Griffiths also said, “For Israel, the war aims have not radically changed. We've heard still that Israel reserves the right to re-engage, although think the deal itself is very positive. We know that there is no resolution at the moment to the day after, the governance of the Palestinian territories, the role of Hamas.”

In the second and third phases of the deal, Israel has the opportunity to sabotage the deal by changing their demands. According to yNet, Trump has assured Israeli leaders that if they later decide to resume violence, the US will support them.

“President Trump, according to a source familiar with the details, has already promised Netanyahu and minister Ron Dermer that if they agree to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of IDF forces from the Gaza Strip, he will support Israel retroactively if it decides to return to fighting and violate the ceasefire.”

Surely, this agreed initial 42-day ceasefire will provide much-needed relief after 15 months of heightened escalation of the genocide. But it would be unwise to forget Israel bombed Palestinians while ceasefire negotiations were under way in Qatar. And Israel exists on the land it occupies by violating many previous agreements. So would it be wise to trust Israel and the US of all nation states? When has America ever served anyone but herself?

Invent an Israel, missile by missile

In 1986, when Biden was a member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had opposed the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia because they were not able to become “agents of US interests in the Persian Gulf region”. He reiterated that the US sees Israel as a critical “strategic ally” in the West Asia. Putting it as bluntly as he could, he said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” 

At a briefing on Wednesday, Biden said “it is a very good afternoon now”, and “soon, the hostages will return home to their families”.

The US mostly, alongside Qatar and Egypt,  played a pivotal role in brokering this ceasefire. The swift agreement — remarkably similar to a deal proposed eight months ago — highlights the US's capacity to control Israel but also the country’s complicity in enabling the humanitarian crisis.

Israel is the repetition of American imperialism, colonisation occupation and genocide of Native Americans. A tried, tested and established exercise.

Israel dropped over 85,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza from October 2023 to November 2024. Over 50,000 tonnes of weapons were delivered from the US to Israel between October 2023 and August 2024. For a man who feels “too many innocent people have died”, Biden could have ended the genocide at any moment but didn’t. Or even better, never supported it during his disgraceful presidency. With its bloody hands, America aims to fulfil her promise to its ally Israel as her “commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad”.

We did Joe

The US will control Gaza. As a member of the Partner Nations alongside Egypt and Qatar, it will control civic affairs in a “reformed Gaza” like healthcare, water and energy distribution. An interim security force consisting of troops from the Partner Nations would create “a secure environment for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts” and prevent weapon smuggling by Hamas. Yes, Hamas will carry the onus of the war since Israel and the US criminalise resistance.

How many crimes against humanity has Israel committed?

Headed by delusional war criminals and oppressors, Israel has sought to dehumanise and humiliate Palestinians, all for a “promised land” that seems to grow larger each day. Israeli troops are accused of raping, torturing and abusing Palestinians, especially in detention. 

In Sde Teiman, a military base but also a reported Israeli 'torture centre' in the Negev desert, increasing reports of torture are hauntingly identical to the stories of abuse at the US’s notorious Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.

A video of Sde Teiman shows a prisoner being selected from a larger group lying bound on the floor. The victim is then escorted to a wall, where guards, using their shields to hide their identities from the camera, proceed to rape him. Ten soldiers were arrested for the rape on 29 July in a case that sent shockwaves through Israel.

What is abhorrent, however, is that for most Israelis, including the country’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the outrage was centred on the “crime” of recording the video, and not on the rape.

On 8 August 2024, in a post on X, Smotrich demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”

Others, like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, within Israel, have argued that any action — even gang rape — is permissible if it is undertaken for the security of the state, Al Jazeera reported.

Israel is synonymous with arbitrary arrests and detention without trial of Palestinians across all occupied territories. Pictures of Palestinian men kneeling on the ground in nothing but their undergarments, herded by IDF soldiers, are an indication of the increase in abuse Palestinians have been subjected to ever since 7 October.

Could this truly, despite our better judgment, be a ceasefire? Will the dead be mourned in peace at last without the sound of airstrikes? Will the ones celebrating now in the rubble with rumbling stomachs and dried blood on their skins, live to see a Gaza that is for them only? As it always was?

Is Palestine truly free? From the river to the sea?