Is it over? Last night I received a deluge of messages and calls about the ceasefire that’s now news around the world. Ola, my friend inside Gaza, was jubilant – ‘the street is filled with celebrations!’ She Whatsapped me. I could almost hear the intense relief in her voice. ‘thankfully ceasefire has been announced officially!’
Over in Belgium, another Gazan friend was more diffident. ‘I hope so’ he said on the phone, ‘I hope this bloody genocide is over but we can only hope.’ His voice was very different, incredibly tired from the inside; I heard fearful reticence that this will be another short-lived pause between waves of bloodshed.
Even if you have lived in Gaza, as I did for a year and a half, it’s not possible to imagine the scale of deliberate destruction across the Strip. I look at images of where I used to live in Gaza city centre; homes and schools reduced to rubble, people walking in single file like ghosts along mangled streets.
Almost fourty seven thousand Gazans are confirmed killed including at least 13,319 children. At least ten thousand additional women, men and children are entombed in collapsed buildings where they were crushed to death. One hundred and ten thousand Gazans are seriously injured, around a quarter of them – 28,000 people – are maimed for the rest of their lives. Ninety two percent of homes across Gaza are destroyed or damaged. Please read those figures again; we need to register the bloodbath Gazans have lived through these last fifteen months.
I am not interested to offer a BBC style impartial or ‘balanced’ perspective, and frankly I’m probably incapable of doing so. I personally know people who died crushed in their homes in Gaza city. I have messaged some of my Gazan friends several times a week over these fifteen months, learning about their daily experiences that no-one should have to survive.
My friend Saida spent months living in a rat-infested shed with her family; she told me she could feel her spine pushing on her stomach when she lay down, she had lost so much weight. One week ago, the UN published a harrowing report on babies freezing to death across Gaza. let’s be clear: these young children’s deaths are a direct result of Israeli military policy.
The cruelty of this bloodbath – I refuse the sanitised word conflict because this is not a conflict, it is a bloodbath – has unleashed the worst of Israeli and Palestinian political autocrats, who each have blood splattered on their hands. Having killed 1,200 Israelis and taken hostages in October 2023 knowing the bloody price Gazans would pay, Hamas now seeks a permanent ceasefire. But, as commentator Chris Hedges notes, Israeli government policy is unequivocally focused on its right to ‘re-engage militarily’.
Both sides carry hardwired contradictions: Hamas refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist (you cannot unmake a nation state, certainly not one as heavily armed by US weaponry as Israel). The Israeli government meanwhile repeatedly claimed to be wiping out Hamas – which it has failed to do – at the same time its negotiators David Barnea and Ronen Bar (the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet respectively) have liaised with Hamas political bureau chief Khalil al Hayya via Quatari and Egyptian mediators.
Outside of Palestine, this war has also revealed ugliness amongst some of us who claim to be human rights defenders; for example, denigrating the horrors Israeli hostages inside Gaza have lived through – I’m especially thinking of the sexual assaults endured by some Israeli women at the hands of Hamas captors – does not help people in Gaza. Denying the hell Israeli families of hostages are living through does not help them either. Dehumanising others does not resolve anything; one of the festering wounds of war is when we lose our humanity for people we assume sit on the other ‘side’.
Jewish friends across Britain have confided to me about feeling nervous in public, about speaking up including in protests about Gaza because they are not on the right ‘side’. I’ve heard far more antisemitism here in Britain than I ever heard when I lived inside Gaza.
Jews for Justice for Palestine represents more than three thousand Jews across Britain, has consistently condemned the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, and its warmongering language, and supports, amongst others, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights where I used to work as a human rights investigator. These are our political friends.
No-one has won this war. Netanyahu’s ever-further right government has spectacularly failed on all counts. He has not brought the hostages home. He has not destroyed Hamas’ capabilities. Just a few days ago rockets were fired towards Israel, from the rubble of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, a gesture of pitiful defiance that once again humiliates Israeli military strategy.
‘Stage-one’ of the ceasefire, scheduled to last 42 days, will see military combat stop and Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages released. This is also when longer-term mediation efforts will kick-in, attempting to sustain this fragile ceasefire.
Most of us know there is only one solution to quell this political bloodbath and military occupation; a political settlement that includes Israel, Hamas, leaders the wider Middle East region – especially Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, and the US. Despite Tony Blair’s controversial track record in the region, I suspect that Britain’s interests will be most heavily influenced by his meaty institute for global change.
As Biden and Trump wrestle publicly over who ‘won’ the ceasefire (Biden desperate for a legacy, Trump desperate to eat all possible praise even before he takes the oath) I can assure you of two things. First, without the seeds of a just political settlement this ceasefire will last a few weeks at most, and morph into a ‘forever war’ which, frankly, it has been since 1948.
Secondly, on Saturday 18 January – twenty four hours before the ceasefire (if it is still in place) begins – the Israeli military will bomb hard, to remind Gazans they do still wield the lethal capacity to raze what is left inside the mangled cemetery of the Strip.
