Call it what you want—a “ceasefire,” a “temporary truce,” or a “humanitarian pause.” For Palestinians in Gaza, it’s simultaneously a moment to breathe and nothing more than a mirage. For fifteen months, Gaza has been flattened under the weight of relentless Israeli bombardment and siege, its people turned to statistics, entire neighborhoods to rubble. A brief respite, no matter how short-lived, will give Palestinians a chance to start the immense task of digging the bodies of their loved ones out from under fifty million tons of debris, and to begin to come to terms with what has been lost in this ongoing genocide. The coming months will see new, unfathomable horrors dug up in Gaza. They will prove that genocide is not conducted with bombs alone and does not come to an end when the guns fall silent.
And yet, there’s nothing quite like a ceasefire to make the world feel better about itself—as if it were an excuse to close what has been an unpleasant book, return it to its place on the shelf to collect dust, and get on with more pressing business. But don’t mistake the ceasefire for peace. In fact, it’s a tactical reset: a chance for Israel to regroup and reload, for Washington to notch what appears on its face to be a diplomatic breakthrough, and for the international community to sigh with relief and divert their gaze, until the next massacre demands our fleeting attention. Because this ceasefire agreement, whether it even survives past its first phase, isn’t a triumph of diplomacy; it’s a calculated transaction. The trauma of genocide has reached new depths, and the root causes of this horror—occupation, apartheid, and the unchecked impunity of a settler-colonial state—remain untouched. In fact, the illusion of peace may further entrench these dynamics, which are waiting to trigger the next cycle of slaughter.
The United States’ culpability in this ongoing atrocity has normalized and redefined what states can justify in the name of security and power. What Gaza has ushered in will reverberate around the world, shattering the illusion of “never again” and proving that the lessons of the past have been unlearned.
The politics around how we arrived at this ceasefire agreement serve as proof of the immense influence Washington wields over Israel—when it chooses to use it, that is. The terms of the current ceasefire agreement are largely identical to those Hamas agreed to back in May 2024. In both the current agreement and its previous iterations, Israel and Hamas agreed to a phased approach, starting with a forty-two-day truce during which Hamas will release thirty-three Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and captives, and Israel will allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. The second phase includes further negotiations around a permanent ceasefire and a phased Israeli military withdrawal, while the final phase focuses on Gaza’s long-term reconstruction. What changed over the last eight months, in addition to the senseless killings of tens of thousands of Palestinians and dozens of Israeli hostages, was the arrival of a president who was willing to use real diplomatic pressure to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to commit to a ceasefire.
Netanyahu, ever the opportunist, clearly sees the ceasefire as a chance to extract lucrative concessions from Washington.
In many ways, Israel’s war was also former President Biden’s war. Biden could never bring himself to use his leverage to influence Israel’s conduct because he is blinded by a genuine, heartfelt commitment to a Zionist ethos that exists solely in his imagination. Biden, who has repeatedly described himself as a Zionist and oozed about his “love” for Bibi, spent his presidency unwilling to see how both Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its genocide in Gaza were not only morally grotesque in their own right but also detrimental to American, Israeli, and regional interests. His support of Israel’s war has not wavered even as it has gotten in the way of other priorities, such as regional normalization, or the so-called “pivot to Asia,” or even just winning the 2024 presidential election.
Donald Trump, ever the dealmaker, saw an opportunity to claim the easy victory Biden squandered. While Trump undoubtedly shares many of the same geostrategic objectives that informed Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, he is free from the ideological commitments that prevented Biden from seeing the ways that Israeli impunity undermines U.S. interests. Trump’s support for Israel is purely transactional—rooted in what it can deliver for him. The ceasefire deal isn’t about principle or morality; it’s about optics and expedience. It offers him a PR victory—a chance to gloat about achieving what Biden could not—and clears the path for his administration to prioritize other goals, like brokering a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unlike Biden, who allowed Israel’s assault on Gaza and regional escalations to derail progress on normalization, Trump is intent on removing any obstacle that interferes with his broader ambitions.
But you would have to be delusional to see Trump as the hero in this equation. Netanyahu, ever the opportunist, clearly sees the ceasefire as a chance to extract lucrative concessions from Washington and set the stage for the next phase of Israel’s slow, deliberate, expansionist march.
Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition partners have already threatened to bring down his government if Israel does not resume its campaign in Gaza after the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, regardless of the fates of the remaining hostages. But beyond that, Netanyahu will expect a return on his investment. By framing a ceasefire in Gaza as a major concession, he can demand full cooperation and support from the Trump administration when it comes to a whole host of Israeli priorities, ranging from annexing of vast swathes of the West Bank to moving forward with direct attacks on Iran.
We are already seeing the results. On his first day back in office, Trump lifted sanctions the Biden administration had placed on Israeli settlers responsible for violent pogroms against Palestinians across the West Bank. Of course, those sanctions did little to curb the state-backed Israeli settler terrorism that has skyrocketed over the past few years, but the move is a useful indicator that Trump will be even less interested in holding Israelis accountable than his predecessor. Already, Trump has declared his desire to “just clean out” Gaza by forcibly relocating millions of Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, which would effectively complete Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has begun implementing in the West Bank the same devastating tactics it used in Gaza. Last Monday, Israeli forces locked down several Palestinian cities throughout the West Bank, making it even more difficult than usual for Palestinians to move freely and go about their daily lives. A day later, Israel launched a new operation targeting Palestinian resistance groups in Jenin, carrying out air strikes and ground raids that killed at least sixteen Palestinians. Nobody has been willing to restrain Israel, so why would they stop now?
But it’s not just about what Israel stands to gain in return for a ceasefire: it’s also about what it has already taken. In Gaza, the official death toll now stands at over 47,000, a number that is increasingly regarded as a severe undercount because it doesn’t include thousands who are missing or buried under the rubble, resulting from Israel’s blockade and destruction of Gaza’s health care infrastructure. This wasn’t collateral damage. This carnage was central to Israel’s true objectives, which were never about eradicating Hamas or securing the release of hostages—many of whom died during Israel’s stalling tactics—but rather about “thinning out” Gaza’s population and asserting broader regional dominance.
The current state of Gaza reflects the scale and intent of this strategy. According to the UN, nearly 60 percent of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including 92 percent of housing units. As a result, 90 percent of the population is now displaced. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, not as the result of fierce gun battles but in controlled demolitions Israeli soldiers have recorded and posted on social media for the world to see. All of this to create expansive buffer zones and carve out military corridors that have swallowed over 36 percent of the Gaza Strip, laying the foundation for a future of perpetual Israeli control and possibly even settlement. Much of what remains, from built-up residential areas to agricultural land, is now uninhabitable, forcing survivors into highly controlled and surveilled concentration camps in south and central Gaza.
In northern Gaza, the desolation is even more complete: Israeli forces have executed what they call the “Generals’ Plan,” a campaign of systematic destruction and displacement of everything north of Gaza City. Neighborhoods like Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Jabalia, once home to hundreds of thousands, have been reduced to ruins, their populations forcibly removed to further consolidate Israeli control and set the stage for future settlements.
Beyond Gaza, Israel has used its blank check from the United States to reshape the entire Middle East region. It struck heavy blows to Hezbollah and leveraged the collapse of the Assad regime to expand its hold on the Golan Heights and claim strategic areas around Mount Hermon. In the West Bank, settler violence has escalated dramatically, enabled and facilitated by the Israeli state and military—and now the Trump administration—that shares its objectives. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority has intensified its crackdown on resistance in the West Bank, effectively working as a subcontractor for the Israeli military in hopes that Israel and the United States will find them compliant enough to someday be allowed to govern what remains of Gaza.
So here we are, at the start of a long-heralded ceasefire in Gaza that will undoubtedly save thousands of lives. But if we take a step back, it becomes clear that this is not a resolution—it’s a transition to a terrifying new phase of Israel’s long-standing strategy to achieve “maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” its guiding doctrine, with the full support and encouragement of the Trump administration.
This ceasefire marks Israel’s completion of what is just the first stage of ethnic cleansing, rendering much of Gaza uninhabitable and most of its surviving population refugees. Those who remain and attempt to return to their homes will be faced with the debilitating trauma of the last fifteen months. Now, they must begin the process of digging up yet more horrors from under the rubble. So far, over three hundred bodies have been discovered under collapsed homes, in hastily buried shallow graves, or on the streets, their remains often devoured by stray dogs and cats. In many cases, bones are all that’s left. And those bones tell stories of summary executions and torture, the details of which will emerge with time. But the remains of many of the more than ten thousand missing people may never be found.
This ceasefire offers us a moment to confront our own complicity with the systems that have allowed this genocide to happen. No one can claim ignorance.
In the midst of this horror, Gazans will also be tasked with figuring out how to survive in a land that Israel has deliberately left devoid of the fundamental necessities that sustain life: infrastructure, health care systems, and even soil. But Palestinians, like all people, want more than to just survive. They want to thrive and experience the same freedoms that we all demand. That was not the reality of life in Gaza long before October 7, which was defined by making the best out of decades-long, suffocating military occupation and blockade. Today, during the ceasefire, even that unjust and deeply precarious paradigm feels unattainable. Those without the means to leave Gaza will be corralled into fragmented shards of territory and left at the mercy of an entity that remains determined to erase them.
This period of taking stock is not just for Palestinians. It’s a reckoning for all of us, for a world that has to grapple with collective numbness in the face of people being crushed to death by tanks, refugees burned alive as they slept in their tents, and parents forced to collect the limbs of their dead children in plastic bags. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has ushered in a new age, at a moment where the world grappling with the internal contradictions of liberalism, an intensifying climate catastrophe, and the resurgence of far-right extremism, all of which stand to reconfigure global politics as we know it.
After World War II, the introduction of international law and human rights norms was intended to restrain the most violent aspects of human nature. Today, we are hurtling toward a new world, in which many of the rights and protections of the postwar liberal order are stripped away. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is pioneering this dizzying trajectory. Palestinians won’t be the only victims of the AI weapons systems and intelligence apparatuses that Israel has used so effectively in Gaza. The normalization of mass atrocities, like tech-mediated genocide and livestreamed ethnic cleansing, will leave us paralyzed, but perhaps not altogether surprised, when the next victims are targeted. When children can be sniped at will, when hospitals and journalists are apparently legitimate targets, when a military can posthumously deem their victims “terrorists” with no need for evidence and still receive unconditional funding and support from the defenders of the so-called rules-based international order, then we are all dragged back to a point in our evolution we thought we left in the past.
This ceasefire offers us a moment to confront our own complicity with the systems that have allowed this genocide to happen. No one can claim ignorance—we have all borne witness to the first genocide to be recorded in real time for the world to see. It’s up to all of us to ensure that collective numbness doesn’t define this new era.
Israel could not have carried out its campaign without U.S. tax dollars funding its bombs and missiles. Nor could they have done so without Washington bending over backward to shield Israel from accountability on the international stage and carving out exceptions for Israel in international law. The mechanisms of accountability—the law, arms embargoes, and sanctions—are there. What’s missing is enforcement.
The ceasefire is not a solution but a mirror held up to our collective failure. The root causes that led to October 7 and the subsequent genocide remain unchanged: decades of Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against Palestinians brought us here. Unless both Americans and the rest of the international community acknowledge our role in allowing these conditions to persist, hold Israel accountable, and demand a political solution that ensures Palestinians their rights and freedom, history will repeat itself.
The Trump administration won’t pretend to be an honest peace broker between Israelis and Palestinians. But that may finally make the truth—that the United States is and has always been a complicit partner in Israel’s atrocities—undeniable. With Washington’s mask fully off, the responsibility falls on Americans to refuse complicity. While this administration is unlikely to ever impose an arms embargo on Israel, the American public can still build a sustained political demand to end the use of their tax dollars in funding Israeli apartheid and war crimes. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue; who wants their hard-earned money to fund the slaughter of children?
Simultaneously, the rest of the world has an opportunity to fill the void left open by Washington’s abandonment of even the pretense of upholding international law. If the rules-based order is to mean anything—or perhaps if it is to finally mean something—other states must hold Israel accountable. This means fulfilling their obligations under international law, imposing economic sanctions, and enacting arms embargoes against Israel. Countries that have long deferred to U.S. leadership now have an opportunity to uphold the principles they claim to champion. Failing to do so will have consequences that no one is immune from.