Israel has blatantly and repeatedly breached the ceasefire agreement since it was announced, as Gaza’s horror continues. In the last 24 hours, Israeli forces have massacred over 100 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Yet Trump maintains that the misnamed “peace deal” won’t be jeopardised. Clearly, Palestinian lives don’t matter to this deal, as Israel can bomb civilians, including children, with impunity.
Starvation, torture and destruction
Gaza still faces mass starvation as only a trickle of desperately needed aid is being allowed in. Just 750 metric tons of food is entering the Strip daily; the World Food Programme estimates that 2,000 metric tons is needed as a minimum. The Israeli army has imposed an arbitrary “yellow line” in the Strip, where it has military control over 57% of the land.
Palestinians are living with the trauma of two years of genocide, the mass destruction of life and the means of living. An estimated 90% of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, and the health system has been decimated. With no reconstruction taking place, the impact of this destruction will be keenly felt in the winter months.
Even Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House advisor, acknowledged that Gaza resembled the aftermath of the dropping of a nuclear bomb. In fact, the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs have been dropped in the last two years. Unsurprisingly, when asked, Kushner still refused to admit that this is a genocide.
The release of Palestinians, dead and alive, from the dungeons of the Zionist State have revealed the scale of torture being carried out by the Israeli regime. There are testimonies and clear physical evidence of mutilation, sexual violence, and mental torment – practices that have been used for decades, and defended by successive Israeli governments.
Health crisis
In 2018, UN Human Rights Spokesperson Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein concluded that Gaza was a “toxic slump from birth to end”; it is now a wasteland of rubble, human remains, and noxious substances. The sanitation system has been destroyed, and there are mountains of rubbish piling up, adding significant strain on its already decimated healthcare system.
Diseases such as scabies and hepatitis have risen dramatically, as have potentially fatal respiratory illnesses – a result of burning waste. Pollution and the destruction of Gaza’s soil and water system are another by-product of unremitting Israeli state terror. Not for nothing has climate and Palestine solidarity activist, Greta Thunberg, said “there can be no climate justice on occupied land”.
Trump’s fraudulent peace plan
Israel is intent on continuing its suffocation of Gaza, and its informal annexation of the West Bank via expanding colonial settlements. Whether it can return to the all-out destruction it carried out in the last two years is a more open question.
Like with the formal annexation of the West Bank, it is at this stage being restrained by the US regime, which fears the consequences of the Palestine question further destabilising the region. It hopes it can get the process of normalisation between Arab States and Israel back on track, starting with Saudi Arabia.
Western imperialist and capitalist powers are also facing pressure from the global Palestine solidarity movement – a historic movement that mobilised tens of millions against the genocide, culminating in two general strikes in Italy at the end of September and early October.
While there is little sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians within Israeli Jewish society (in fact, polls have shown a frighteningly widespread genocidal sentiment), there is little desire there for a return to what is misleadingly called “the war” of the last two years. This can also be a factor that will restrain the Netanyahu regime.
No justice from on high
However, the Trump administration will face significant obstacles in imposing its much vaunted “peace plan” and implementing its “second phase”. There is little sign that Hamas will disarm, and Palestinians in Gaza will not accept the imposition of a colonial junta to rule the Strip.
No justice, freedom or equality will be delivered to Palestine from murderous, imperialist and autocratic states, especially ones that prop up the rule of the Zionist State, which is genocidal to its core. Its rule, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, must be smashed, along with the system of capitalism and imperialism that it is part of.
The struggle for a free Palestine, an end to occupation, settlements and apartheid is absolutely bound up in a revolutionary struggle for socialism in this region. This can and will only come from below – from the masses of workers, poor and oppressed people.
