Where is the Gaza ‘peace process’ really going? | Ahmad Ibsais

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If you started attending one funeral a day beginning 1 January 2025, you would finish in the year 3887. That is how long it would take to mourn every life lost in Gaza. By then, your grandchildren’s great¹⁰ grandchildren would be dust, and still you would be burying Palestinian bodies from a “war” Israel insists was about self-defense. Even then, this number does not tell you about the thousands of ways these bodies were burned, torn, crushed and made anything but whole.

And yet here we are, watching world leaders gather in Egypt for a “peace summit” last month where the only people absent were Palestinians. The banner read “Peace 2025”, while Palestine’s representatives were barred from the room.

Like clockwork, this “peace” has already eroded with Israel violating the ceasefire through continued bombardments. Why does the world act surprised when a country that commits genocide violates the “ceasefire” it orchestrated? Israel lied about 40 beheaded babies to justify a genocide. And now we’re supposed to believe their commitment to peace?

In the first month, Israel has broken its own agreement at least 100 times: at least 200 murdered, the yellow line breached, food and fuel blocked, reconstruction prevented. In fact, Israel continues to destroy civilians homes in Gaza. Muhammad al-Hallaq, 10, was executed by Israeli forces in occupied Al-Khalil (Hebron) on 17 October 2025. On 19 October, Israel launched 20 airstrikes in Gaza. They call this “maintaining the ceasefire”.

This is the pattern: Israel turns the volume of violence up and down at will, maintaining full dominion over Gaza and the West Bank, then calls each pause a generous “ceasefire”. They violate it immediately, kill Palestinians who dare exist in their own land, then wait for any response, any stone thrown, any rocket fired in defense, to justify their pre-planned retaliation. They did the same thing after they violated the ceasefire in March 2025 during Ramadan. The genocide never ends; it only modulates between active slaughter and slow strangulation. The fact that Israel’s occupation and colonial expansion has continued unpunished by international authorities since 1967 is proof enough that they will never be held to the fire they started.

In 1949, immediately after the UN-brokered armistice, Israeli forces began violating demilitarized zones and launching attacks that killed civilians. In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt and Syria despite knowing Egypt posed no serious threat. Between 1981 and 1982, defense minister Ariel Sharon repeatedly violated a UN ceasefire with the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon with the Sabra and Shatila massacres, trying to provoke a response that would justify his long-planned invasion.

In 2001, as Israeli and Palestinian security officials met to shore up a six-week ceasefire, Israel assassinated a senior Hamas member; nine days later came a retaliatory suicide bombing in Jerusalem. In 2008, Israel violated a months-long truce with Hamas by launching an operation that killed six Hamas members, then used the predictable rocket response to justify Operation Cast Lead, which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians. The method never changes: violate the ceasefire, wait for retaliation, claim victimhood, launch the offensive you’d already planned.

Just look at the West Bank, where Palestinians laid down their weapons after the sham that is the Oslo Accords. What did demilitarization bring them? More settlements, more checkpoints, more children shot by snipers, more olive groves burned, more homes demolished. Even complete submission doesn’t stop hunger.

In fact, nearly half of all Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank since records began in 2005 were killed in just the past two years, 224 children since January 2023 out of 468 total. In 2024, Israel stole 24,258 dunams of Palestinian land, approximately half of all land declared as “state land” since Oslo was signed over 30 years ago. At least 59 new illegal outposts were established in 2024, with 215 Palestinian homes demolished in East Jerusalem. This year, Israel approved its largest settlement expansion since Oslo, 22 new illegal settlements, some deep within Palestine. The UNsecurity council, in Resolution 2334, said Israel’s settlements have “no legal validity and constitutes a fragrant violation under international law”.

This is why Israel destroys not just people, but the means of survival itself: the water treatment plants, the agricultural fields, every hospital, every university. Even after the ceasefire, Israel controls Gaza’s agricultural land.

Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted. Not because Hamas hides there, but because Palestinian existence itself is the threat. They learned from American history: between 30 million and 60 million buffalo roamed North America until the US military deliberately supported their slaughter to control Native Americans, reducing the population to fewer than 1,000 by the late 1880s.

Within one generation after the buffalo slaughter, the average height of Indigenous peoples dropped by more than an inch, child mortality increased by 16 percentage points, and income remained 25% lower through today. You don’t need to kill every Indigenous person if you destroy their capacity to sustain life. The reservation system taught them that the defeated can be left alive as long as they’re left dependent.

Israel won’t be satisfied until Gaza is theirs and the West Bank is gone. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “Palestinians will leave in great numbers to third countries.” Heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu declared: “All of Gaza will be Jewish.” They broadcast their intentions while the world pretends surprise at each new violation, each broken agreement, each dead child they claim was a mistake.

Thus, the “peace process” has become a piece process, Palestinians robbed of their land piece by piece, until nothing remains but the reservations they’re allocated. Just look to Sinjil in the West Bank, now fenced in; or, Jenin and Nablus having been besieged in the last two years.

But how can we even speak of “peace” when we carry Gaza in our bones? Peace cannot exist for any Palestinian, or anyone with eyes still capable of witnessing, who has seen Israel’s depravity. I still hear the Palestinian child wiping his mother’s blood from the floor; I hear the father’s wail as he placed the pieces of his child into a plastic bag; I feel the ways Palestine has been carved, dehumanized, and brutalized to carry out an extermination campaign by those who call themselves “chosen”.

These images don’t fade with “ceasefires”.

Palestinian self-determination cannot end with Palestinians relegated to the same systems of oppression that destroyed Indigenous peoples across the world. It cannot end with apartheid and rebranded as compromise. True peace requires what terrifies Israel most: equal rights for all from the river to the sea. As America might say, from sea to shining sea.

They want us to celebrate when the bombing pauses, to be grateful for the moments between murders, to thank them for allowing a trickle of food into the concentration camp they’ve built. But we know what “peace” built on graves looks like. A genocide can’t bring peace because the logic that justifies mass murder doesn’t stop at borders drawn by killers. But every Palestinian child born is proof that genocide fails, “existence is resistance” as the phrase goes, and we’ve never stopped existing.