A ceasefire may be imminent in Gaza. It’s a phrase repeated many times, rarely bearing fruit, each instance lifting hopes, only to crush them. A cycle of anticipation giving way to despair.
This time, US President Donald Trump insists there will be a breakthrough.
To say the ceasefire is desperately needed is an understatement of epic proportions. For nearly two years, Gaza’s besieged population has endured relentless, systematic slaughter and crimes on an industrial scale.
Human Rights Watch has concluded that Israel’s cruel campaign has become a tool of extermination. Amnesty International has confirmed that starvation is being weaponised as a tool of genocide. The International Committee of the Red Cross has described the situation as worse than hell on earth.
But even those words fall short of capturing a reality where transporting dead bodies on donkey carts has become routine. Where shredded limbs are not props in a ghoulish Hollywood horror, but a daily sight in Gaza. Where engineered famine drives Palestinians to eat sand in place of flour. Where The Hunger Games is no longer fiction, but a chilling reality, one in which Palestinians are lured toward aid trucks, only to be gunned down by American contractors and Israeli soldiers. Literally, a game.
Where once the mention of a headless child or a burning toddler might have provoked an irrevocable wince, now it prompts only a grim question: “Which one?”
Where a new world has been etched into existence, one where the inhumane, calculated killing of Palestinians is not a crime but a marketing pitch for “battle-tested” weapons with “proven precision.”
In a rare moment of honesty, Israeli officials boasted about killing 100 Palestinians a day without the world caring. They told mainstream media about the killing fields Gaza had become, confident in a system that guarantees 100 percent impunity and zero accountability.
“Gaza will become a place where no human can exist,” they promised. Well, congratulations to the sinister policymakers and military chiefs in Israel: Palestinians are now praying to die rather than endure another day at the mercy of Israel’s war machine.
“I have no fears other than the possibility that the ceasefire won’t happen this time,” one person in Gaza described. Little wonder that this has become the prevailing sentiment.
For everyone outside Gaza, there too exists a fragile optimism, born not of confidence, but of profound disempowerment, as our screens overflow with relentless horror. We await a pause not because it brings peace to us, but to them.
But our responsibility remains unchanged: we are confronting a system built on an ironclad commitment to sustain Israel’s mission of Palestinian annihilation and dispossession. Until that structure, and the grim reality it imposes, is fully dismantled, any notion of pause is both premature and unjust.
Even as talks of a ceasefire supposedly progress, Israeli officials are drawing up yet more menacing plans for ethnic cleansing, this time with blueprints for concentration camps in Gaza. Every time the brutalities seem to have peaked, Israel surpasses them with egregious, unwavering consistency.
It is a sobering reminder: when the strategic objective is colonialism, there is no such thing as reprieve. A ceasefire is not peace. It is not liberation. Because even if a moment of reprieve arrives in Gaza, it will not stop illegal settlers from terrorising homes in the West Bank, nor Israeli snipers from deliberately targeting Palestinian children, acts that persist alongside relentless land theft.
There has, undoubtedly, been an awakening. It was never ‘complicated,’ and more people are beginning to realise that. Nor are there two ‘sides’ in this supposed level playing field of irreconcilable narratives, competing claims, and so-called land disputes. That recognition must continue to steadfastly instruct resistance.
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But such is human nature: there will be a tendency to turn away from Gaza. A perhaps inevitable, creeping thought follows: if hundreds of thousands filled the streets chanting for a ceasefire, and it has come, what now remains?
The suggestion that the gaze can so easily shift away from Gaza is neither speculative nor rooted in cynicism. It is grounded in precedent. For 12 days, when Iran and Israel exchanged blows, Gaza was relegated in importance. Forgotten once again, in a cruel echo of the Palestinian experience over the last century: briefly remembered, then conveniently erased. True to form, Israel’s violence did not wane
One thing is certain: the global media will look elsewhere. These campaigns of systematic slaughter are the only times Gaza is momentarily prioritised by the mainstream. One more campaign ends, and they will no doubt circle back the next time the “status quo” is breached, when Israel once again returns to mow the lawn.
Then the cycle resumes. There will be performative hand-wringing over why this “conflict” keeps erupting, as a former Israeli surveillance chief turned analyst, or a former prime minister notorious for bombing Palestinians, is welcomed as a credible, enlightened guest. He will fill the airwaves and column inches, offering recycled takes on the viability of a two-state solution.
But it is precisely that woefully inadequate state of affairs, the management of occupation, that must not return. Relief does not equate to life. As the young and supremely talented journalist from Gaza, Abubaker Abed, recently said from Ireland: “I consider myself two months old,” referring to the time he has spent outside Gaza. “Because there is no life in Gaza,” he continued.
There is work to do. People who non-violently resist Israel’s genocide are being designated terrorists. An 83-year-old retired vicar was arrested not for supporting genocide, but for opposing it. Israeli soldiers will soon be walking the streets of our cities, fresh from systematically maiming, slaughtering, oppressing, and exterminating Palestinians. Justice means every single one of them is behind bars for war crimes.
Broadcasters and press outlets manufactured consent for Israel’s unspeakable horrors, then whitewashed war crimes and shielded the public from their full extent. They have already begun trying to launder their reputations with editorials and reports that now, suddenly, capture and convey the scale of Israel’s atrocities. Justice is when their names are no longer associated with bylines, but with complicity in war crimes.
A whole ecosystem was built to shield Israel from accountability, an ecosystem that made this genocide possible. Justice means dismantling it entirely, from the pipeline of support to the ethnonationalist project it enables.
Palestinians, with or without a ceasefire, must rebuild from the hell they have endured. Young children must now confront life without their parents, who were mercilessly killed. That coping will look different for each of them. How can life return to normal for eyes that have seen so much? It is a question we must answer.
“When finally, Palestinian children no longer fear the sky but feel safe beneath it.” The words of UNICEF global ambassador James Elder should be treated as a manifesto.
Solidarity is the minimum. Action must be sustained, in whatever form is most accessible and potent, whether through boycott campaigns, the creation of new political institutions, the election of representatives without blood-soaked hands, renewed legal campaigns, committed grassroots organising, or relentless accountability in arenas that mainstream organisations have shamefully abandoned. Inaction is inadmissible and inexcusable.
This, then, is a reminder. Perhaps first and foremost to myself. The bombs may eventually cease. The drones may fall silent. Aid might finally begin to flow. But that is not a moment to exhale in relief. It is not peace, and it is not a trap cloaked in help. It is simply the next phase in a long and brutal struggle.
Still, the three words that have come to define the past 21 months remain our call to action: don’t look away.
“I ask you now: do not stop talking about Gaza. Do not let the world turn its gaze away from it. Keep fighting, and keep telling our stories, until Palestine is free.”
That was the last message from slain Palestinian journalist Hussam Shabat. If for nothing else, do it for him.
Hamza Yusuf is a British Palestinian journalist and writer based in London.
Follow him on X: @Hamza_a96
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.