The Deceit of Ceasing Fire

When Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, I happened to be in New York City. I was overwhelmed with horror, rage, guilt, and a searing shame at our inability to stop the nightmare unfolding before our eyes. This was not for lack of trying. The protests that broke out all over the city were transformative—even before the encampments that would proliferate globally from their epicenter at Columbia University. Organizers and activists who have been working for Palestinian liberation, diligently and relentlessly building the infrastructure of the movement in the US for decades, sprang into action, pulling off spectacular protests. One evening, I walked with a chanting crowd into Grand Central Station, where protestors climbed on the walls and unfurled massive banners reading “Never Again Means Never Again for Anybody” and “Ceasefire Now!” The bustling space was transformed into a site of mourning and grief, but also of commitment, anger, and invigoration in the face of gaslighting by the media and police intimidation. We demanded an immediate ceasefire.

We knew this demand was inadequate even as we made it. We understood that an end to the attacks meant taking Palestinians in Gaza back to October 6, at best—a return to slow strangulation, rather than the current spectacular and rapid killing spree. A time in which Palestinians were still being murdered by Israeli forces, only outside of the limelight. At a minimum, ceasefire was the pragmatic, desperate demand to return to a brutal apartheid past. Such was the anticipated horror of an escalation of genocide that this demand felt like—and indeed was—an urgent intervention.

There was also the knowledge that within the political landscape of the United States, this was the most that could be demanded. Ceasefire is a tent broad enough to bring in people from a spectrum of political opinions who all fundamentally agree that mass murder is never the answer. Ceasefire, we thought, would save lives and offer policymakers and politicians a concrete proposal. In the most hopeful case, it would also provide an opening: If we could shift the landscape of organizing in the US and bring more people into the demand for a ceasefire, we could build toward future political mobilization.

The ceasefire would not be secured until October 2025. In those first two years of genocide, Israel murdered men, women, and children, taking the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza, in a conservative estimate, to over 70,000 people, including more than 20,000 children. Even though that rate dropped significantly with the passing of the ceasefire agreement—Israel now murders at a rate of four people a day—the killing continued unabated. It speaks to the bloodletting we have collectively witnessed that the killing of more than 1,390 Palestinians, including 300 children, in Gaza since the ceasefire began is seen as “saving lives.” That is to say nothing of Palestinians who continue to be killed, tortured, and incarcerated elsewhere in historic Palestine. The rate of killing in the West Bank went from about 50 Palestinians annually between 2006 and 2022 to more than 620 per year since October 2023. That rate has not dropped since the ceasefire began.

A ceasefire is a political agreement to end hostilities between warring parties, but as military theorist Carl von Clausewitz might agree, politics is the continuation of war by other means.¹ In the context of an anticolonial movement working for liberation, however, the word “ceasefire” is ill-fitting, as is the word “war.” Military battles are not even the primary expression of hostility between two parties within a colonial relationship—the violence is structural. An end of hostilities on the battlefield that does not address the original structural violence is not a true ceasefire agreement. It is a demand for subordination.

The structural violence of Israeli apartheid can be lethal without a single shot being fired. In the shadow of the ceasefire, the killing of Palestinians indirectly—as in outside of firepower—is overwhelming. Malnutrition and starvation due to the lack of humanitarian supplies have resulted in higher child mortality as well as spikes in elderly deaths. Those who require urgent medical care, as well as those with terminal conditions, such as cancer patients or those in need of dialysis, die since the healthcare structure has been decimated. Without adequate sanitation or water supplies, diseases ravage bodies now facing the cold and floods of winter, stranded on a seashore with nothing but tents. All these factors collectively work to kill Palestinians directly or indirectly, slowly or rapidly.

Hamas and Israel have long understood the flimsiness of ceasefires and integrated that shortfall into their political calculations. Before the genocide broke out, the two were locked in a military tit-for-tat that lasted more than a decade. Israel’s objective for Gaza was to maintain “calm” for its communities—meaning no rocket fire—while the blockade was left in place and sufficient deterrence was built that Palestinians silently accepted their fate. Peace for Israelis meant suffering and death for Palestinians, and Hamas would consistently challenge the blockade in armed or unarmed ways. With every eruption of hostilities, a new ceasefire agreement would be negotiated. Israel would take some measures to ease the blockade temporarily, but otherwise maintain its strangulation, and expect peace in return. For Hamas, there can be no peace until the blockade is lifted.

The discrepancies between Hamas’s objectives and Israel’s were usually papered over by phased agreements. After the three major conflagrations of 2009, 2012, and 2014, the negotiations followed roughly the same script. The first phase entailed a cessation of fire, to be followed by the entry of aid, an increase in the number of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza, culminating in the reconstruction of the bombed-out structures, or some combination of these measures. No ceasefire agreement ever moved beyond the initial stage and into reconstruction. By consistently being limited to phase one, ceasing fire, the agreements themselves became a much-needed tool for the occupier to release mounting pressure while maintaining domination and sustaining a murderous “status quo.”

The October 2025 ceasefire was formalized after months of negotiation by what the UN deemed a “historic” agreement in July 2026. After an ostensible end to hostilities, it was agreed that in the first phase Israel would allow aid into the strip, and in subsequent phases Palestinian factions would decommission their weapons as Israeli troops withdrew from the over two-thirds of Gaza they had recaptured. A technocratic Palestinian body was formed to supervise progress and commence plans for reconstruction in Gaza. Within days, the agreement faltered: Israel reneged, declaring it wanted the disarmament of all Palestinian factions before it withdrew—in other words, a full submission forced politically when it had failed to do so militarily. This was not only in conflict with the agreement, but was also out of sequence: Disarmament was to be discussed following the entry of aid into Gaza. But aid remains entirely inadequate, and the Palestinian body managing this agreement and reconstruction has yet to be allowed into Gaza, or to begin any meaningful work.

This is precisely the intention. As with all past ceasefires, Israel has reverted to the slow, systematic strangulation of the Gaza Strip, and mired any talk of aid and reconstruction in endless bureaucracy. The killing of Palestinians, which has not ceased, can however no longer be seen as a direct consequence of Israeli actions, for there are in place a ceasefire agreement, a Palestinian supervising body, and international mediators. Killing Palestinians, then, is simply the backdrop to endless negotiations and, as will always be argued, Palestinian intransigence. The ceasefire itself becomes the institutionalization of Palestinian murder by Israeli forces.

But the 2026 ceasefire differs from past ones in fundamental ways. Through Resolution 2803, the UN has subordinated the Palestinian body chosen to supervise the rebuilding of Gaza to the Trump administration’s Board of Peace. In other words, with UN backing, Gaza has become an American protectorate, and the transitional Palestinian body created to deliver on Palestinian aspirations will now be locked in an indefinite state of transition and be subject to American and Israeli oversight. What we are witnessing is not a ceasefire agreement, but the institutionalization of colonization and domination into our international systems of governance. The US has opened the door to slowly chip away at any viable Palestinian life in the strip, with institutional complicity from the international community. The hope for Israel, delivered in no uncertain terms by its leaders and many of its people, is for Palestinians to vanish, either by leaving or dying, and for American and Israeli moguls and the settler movement to enjoy the spoils of lucrative real estate deals.

This is the logical culmination of pursuing “ceasefire” rather than peace. Ceasefire within colonial struggle merely puts a band-aid on a gushing wound. Most liberation movements did not negotiate their victory; they pursued struggles that ultimately broke the will of the colonizer to sustain their domination. South Africa is an exception, since the African National Congress (ANC) forced the apartheid regime to relinquish its power through a negotiated settlement. But this came after years of an asymmetric and strategic liberation struggle that challenged the regime’s hold, after which the regime finally came to the table to negotiate an end to apartheid. In none of the successful anticolonial movements did the demand for liberation stop at a ceasefire. Colonialism is a structure of ongoing violence, and whether shots are fired or not, Palestinians are being crushed under a ruthless colonial regime.

Even outside of colonial contexts, the definition of ceasefire has been warped in this era of weakening international norms. With Iran, ceasefire negotiations were weaponized in bad faith by American and Israeli officials to trick Iranian counterparts into believing diplomatic pathways were possible, all while measures for an illegal war were being put in place. In Lebanon, even though a ceasefire is technically in place, Israeli forces occupy large swathes of the country, kill Lebanese individuals daily, and pursue a scorched-earth policy of destroying Lebanese villages with no accountability. It seems that ceasefire is just an invitation for the militarily powerful to continue killing under the façade of a peaceful settlement.

Ceasefire is the tip of the spear. A year into the agreement, when the genocide of Palestinians continues under different guises, we have to move beyond demands for a ceasefire. We must be uncompromising in our language: demand peace, not a return to the status quo of Israeli colonization. This is not only a Palestinian concern. The genocide in Gaza has modeled for the world’s imperial powers how to efficiently get rid of surplus populations. How AI platforms can make mass murder more efficient. How humanitarian offerings can be turned into killing fields. How narratives of freedom and justice can be gaslit.

For an actual cessation of death, for true peace, the very structure of Israel’s apartheid must be dismantled. The Nakba must be brought to an end. The demand, then, should not be for a ceasefire, but for a cessation of murder and domination, for accountability and justice instead. In response to how imperial violence is advancing, we need a more fitting response than a ceasefire: What is a truce on the battlefield when murders are carried out in everyday life far beyond the battlefield?

1. In his 1832 treatise On War, Carl von Clausewitz argues the converse: “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” ↩︎